Arts & Culture Queer Life
What It Means to Be Trans in My Tiny Town
My trans friends rarely come home, and when they do, it is for brief bursts of time. They question why I’ve chosen to keep living here.
The first time I shaved my face, it was for a city council meeting.
By then, I had been on HRT long enough for the hair on my face to creep past the point of plausible baby fuzz. I had received a few strange looks in this tiny town, where there are almost no trans people and everyone minds everyone else’s business. The other shifts in my body might be attributable to particularly enthusiastic diet and exercise, but the hair could not—either it had to go, or I did. So I practiced my remarks for the meeting while awkwardly shaving with a cheap razor and some shaving cream I’d pocketed at a hotel months before. It took me half an hour; I might have watched my father shave when I was a child, but it was with a sense of fascination, not an eye to learning how to do it. I somehow managed not to cut myself, marveled at the unsettlingly smooth skin on my face.
Sometimes I forget that there’s a vast audience watching on the local public access station at home, even when the seats at town hall meetings are empty. “You’re very articulate at city council meetings,” people like to say when they run into me at the grocery store. “I saw you on TV.”
The most recent time I shaved my face, it was for the last city council meeting I would attend. I didn’t know it was the last meeting as I swiped away with my overpriced razor, its six adamantium blades honed to precision. It took me three minutes, tops, and it wasn’t the cleanest job, but it would do. I resented the smooth skin on my face, felt like I had sliced a part of myself away.
The man who calls me “tranny” when he thinks I can’t hear him was at that meeting, of course. I felt him staring at me, vibrating with hostility, and I had a sudden realization: I can’t do this anymore.
*
Cheer up, face!
Here is the thing about being trans in a small town: You try very hard to pretend that you are not, because to do otherwise is dangerous.
Let me start over: I never feared for my safety in the small town where I live until after I started transition.
Over again: At least three students in my tiny high school were trans, and we all came out almost immediately upon leaving.
And over: Sometimes I clock the other trans people who live here, but I never approach them, for they do not wish to be clocked. We might ache for community, but we are desperate to believe we fly below the radar. To be known is to have failed.
I never feared for my safety in the small town where I live until after I started transition. Most people in this town think I’m a woman: the nice waitress at the brewery where I get beers with friends; the checker at the grocery store; the guy in the plumbing section at the hardware store who excuses me for being hapless and bumbling; the dentist who said I seemed like a “nice lady” while politely ignoring my existential terror in his exam room; everyone on the city council.
I hate it. I smile fixedly when the waitress says “hey ladies!” and one of the city council members refers to me using the wrong pronoun, because I am terrified of the alternative. I saw what happened when one of the city council thought I was a man and someone on city staff helpfully corrected him. I saw what happened when I appeared in a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle . For every beaming affirmation and “you’re so brave” whispered to me in a store aisle by people who wanted me to know they weren’t transphobic, there was a raised eyebrow in the dairy section, furtive whispering in the post office line.
I know how people talk about me. “It” is one of the least unkind things I hear in this town where everyone plays at being oh-so-nice—just a good old-fashioned small town with a mail lady who carries dog biscuits and real nice guys who show up for the annual women’s march to earnestly wave signs and then go home and neg their wives and girlfriends. They do not like it when their assumptions about my gender are interrupted; every time I think, perhaps, that it is safe to venture out into the world as myself, rather than a caricature of someone I thought died long ago, I regret it. Sometimes I think the weight of it will kill me.
My trans friends rarely come home, and when they do, it is for brief bursts of time. They question why I’ve stubbornly chosen to keep living here. Some days, walking on the headlands and looking out over the water on a beautiful day with the poppies bobbing all around me, I feel like I might have an answer. Other days, I just think, It’s because I’m trapped here .
*
The war is over
They say the past is a foreign country. My body is a map of a person and a place I used to be, lines trailing across me like railroad tracks, leading somewhere I desperately want to go—but I seem to have misplaced my ticket. How far I’ve come, across thousands of miles of uncharted territory, through a wilderness no one has touched. Yet sometimes I feel bound to the tracks, staring at the sky, waiting for the dreaded rumbling of the train.
I resented the smooth skin on my face, felt like I had sliced a part of myself away. When people like me are in the news, it is usually because something terrible has happened to us; because something atrocious is happening; because magazines and newspapers are hiring people who hate us to write about us, running opinion editorials about the existential threat we pose to society. Both sides! they say, and then the nice people in my nice small town read these pieces and “hmm,” they say, “I just don’t know about those people .”
We are only allowed if we are tame, grateful for the dry scraps people want to hand out—they choke going down, but we must smile and tell you how good they taste; they are just what we always wanted, just like our daddies used to make, please, may we have some more? We must not rock the boat, be too much, let the side down, scare the horses. We’re not just living for ourselves; we are object lessons and inspirations and case studies. I must be polite when people ask intrusive questions—on behalf of the next trans person, and those for whom it is even more dangerous to exist. If I snap back at cruelty and ignorance, I’m reinforcing stereotypes.
I plead with city council to do something about the harassment I receive at meetings, but “free speech! The Constitution!”
*
The ‘H’ is out of shave at last
They say the future is trans, but I feel more like the past.
Sometimes, when I’m traveling, I let my face grow. I’m curious to know what I’d look like with facial hair, a real beard instead of neglected stubble, dark brown flecked with increasing gray. I like the way it feels, coarse and full of promise. I look at myself in the fogged bathroom mirror of yet another hotel and I see a different person there, disheveled from travel, but with the hint of something else emerging.
It takes art and patience to craft facial hair that looks casually stubbled, rather than evidence of laziness. I haven’t had the chance to perfect it, because when I go home I have to shave it all off again. I’m going to a meeting where I cannot look like I rolled out of a garbage can; I’m laced up tight for people who knew me a lifetime ago.
“Whisk, whisk, whisk” goes the badger’s-hair brush, churning up froth in the hotel cup I appropriate for the purpose. I still manage not to cut myself; at least, not in the physical sense.
I pick up the razor before a trip to the post office, the humane society where I volunteer, the grocery store, because when I do not I feel the burning looks and see the way people change. A slight shadow might be something that can be dismissed in a fleeting interaction, but I can see when it crosses the line into something suspect, something wrong —when people slowly put pieces together, and do not like the puzzle they have assembled. I see how they react when they think they have made a mistake, how cis men in particular change the angles of their bodies. My conditional admittance to Man Space has been revoked or I am not the gal they thought I was. I have embarrassed them, made them feel uncomfortable.
What are you?
People who consider themselves progressive might ask which pronouns I use and would be the first to say they “support” me, but when it’s dark and I am walking to my car after a city council meeting I keep my keys in my fist, in a way I never did when I thought I was a girl, not even walking through the Tenderloin at two in the morning. I feel an existential dread and sense of panic that does not dissipate until I am in my car, doors locked, on the single road out of town. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just kept driving.
*
Train approaching, whistle squealing
When I go to a city, something changes. I hold myself differently.
In the Bay Area in particular, where there are plenty of chubby guys with telltale chest scars, everyone assumes I’m a man. “Gentlemen,” the waitress at the place with the great lobster rolls says to my group. “No worries, man,” says the guy at the grocery store. “Sir, did you want me to take your bag?” says the bookseller. “I’m so sorry, I think I have the wrong bathroom,” a woman says when she walks in to find me washing my hands. The TSA agents call me Mr. Smith , and if they think there’s a mistake on my ID, they don’t tell me. A man cruises me in the restroom at a show and I’m elated.
I go out with coworkers on a visit to the office in DC, surrounded by my people. I do not have to explain things. My country self is viscerally jealous of my city self, furious that they get to have what she does not. My city self can wear dresses and have a beard if they want.
My country self walks in fear.
*
Stop —
I’ve been thinking a great deal about the Lavender scare, in which thousands of government employees lost their jobs, and some their lives, because a bunch of stuffy, uptight people thought being queer was a threat to national security and codified that into law long before don’t ask, don’t tell . How gay men were persecuted for meeting in public parks because it was the safest place to fuck, and lesbians were drummed out of the armed services because of who they loved. How the merest suspicion of queerness could destroy a life.
Though the machinery behind the Lavender scare ground to a halt in the 1980s, the legacies endured; it wasn’t until the Obama administration that the government even bothered to apologize. Many people were too obsessed with same-gender marriage, the holy grail of the white cis gays, to care. You won! Congratulations! We’re still dying!
When I go to a city, something changes. I hold myself differently. My city self can wear dresses and have a beard if they want. My country self walks in fear. The rhetoric that appeared during the Lavender scare comes up today, too. It’s mostly about trans people in restrooms, or the need to keep us out of the military so we don’t “endanger” people, or our nerve in suggesting that we deserve equal rights and fair treatment. I feel it skittering around me as I walk down the street in my small town, settling on my back and making the hairs of my neck prickle.
I know that people think me dangerous.
In order to have a future, we must have a past; even as experts in transition, it is hard to know when we have transitioned from past to future. We face the grim knowledge that some of us will not make it through this; that even if the other side offers light and hope and joy, right now, in this moment, some of us are in a dark place, screaming. Some of us cannot move forward or back and are caught, stuck where we are, dragonflies in amber. We are stuffed into dresses with awkward smiles and suffocating in suits and gritting our teeth. How far we’ve come! we might say. Please, may we have some more?
*
Avoid that rundown feeling
My father used to lay out his shaving things on the sideboard just so, heating the water and whisking his razor through the bowl, the can of Barbasol sputtering as he dispensed his shaving cream. Afterward, he’d pat his cheeks with a hot towel in a ritual that always captivated me. I’d sit on the counter next to him, swinging my legs as I watched him, handing him his implements one by one.
“Get rid of all the stickerfeet,” I’d tell him, likening the tingling coarseness of his stubble to the small and treacherous burrs that lurked in the grass, waiting to grip my calloused feet with vicious glee.
I didn’t know then what I know now: The real stickerfeet are the many people around us who sink savage hooks into us, hooks that cannot be dislodged with tweezers and a steady hand. The ones who pick and pull and cling and harass for month after month, year after year, until we fall away from public life; from the people we want to be. Those hooks are meant to fix us in the past, immovable, and those of us who try to break free will often bleed for it, leaving soiled footprints in our wake as we walk unsteadily toward a different future.
*
Burma-Shave!
We’re supposed to tell you it gets better, I know, but for some of us, for complicated reasons, maybe it doesn’t. Not always, not everywhere.
Even as experts in transition, it is hard to know when we have transitioned from past to future. The last time I lived in San Francisco, I got drunk as a skunk on cheap red wine and ran down the street in a bathrobe, waving my arms in triumph. I remember being filled with the giddy sense that nothing could ever go wrong, a feeling that can strike at three in the morning when your mouth is hot and sticky with rotten grapes under a light-polluted sky. With the luck of the young and the drunk, I somehow managed not to cut myself on the broken glass in the street.
“I’m an airplane!” I shouted. “I’m an airplane!”
My roommates chased after me through our quiet residential neighborhood, carrying slippers and pants, but for a brief moment, I was flying—I spun free under the dull sky and was, for a time, wholly myself.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to find that person again, or if I will float, endlessly, caught between past and future like kelp in the tide, always torn in two directions.
