If I Met a Talking Unicorn, I Would Have So Many Questions
The questions folks ask a talkative trans woman
In response to a Logan’s Corner Writing Prompt:
I am a late transitioning transgender woman. As such, I may be the only obviously trans person that many people will ever meet. The population of transgender folks in the United States is small. I believe that it is impossible to accurately know how many transgender Americans exist. There is a huge stigma with being trans and it is likely that assimilated transgender people would not out themselves. Additionally, there are an indeterminate number of transgender people who are still in the closet. Those folks are very unlikely to out themselves to any surveyor. Suffice to say, we are rare. I am not ashamed to tell people that I am trans and I expect them to question the Unicorn.
My transgender brother, Logan Silkwood, asked me to talk a little bit about some of the questions that curious folks ask a girl like me.
I didn’t have a grand coming out. I quietly started on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). I figured I had years before it would become obvious, and I didn’t owe anyone an explanation. Until, I wanted to tell. I remember one person in particular to whom I was scared to tell my secret. Juice, a Latin American friend and neighbor. Juice is a very masculine man. In a former life, he slung dope. Now, he is a family man. The term us street rats use to describe what he has become now is, Citizen. Make no mistake, that other guy is in there sleeping and you don’t want to wake him up.
Juice and I are tight, the expression I use to describe how I feel about my closest friends is DTR. Down to Roll. You pull up to my house and say get in. Nothing more needs to be said, we roll. I ended up in Key West on one such occasion. So, telling this very masculine Latin guy that I was now, and always have been, a woman was, as you can imagine, a tad scary. I remember once, before I came out to the world, I would wear clothing generally associated with the opposite gender that I was born. Stealth and on the down-low. I was out in the yard doing something wearing my women’s sandals and Juice was also outside. He said, “Deadname, those are lady's shoes.” He introduced me to a word that day that I had never heard before; Chancletas, a slang term for women’s sandals. Apparently, Latin American moms would take their chancletas off and hit misbehaving children with them. Some women even threw them like a boomerang with laser precision at a fleeing child.
Coming out time. It was a couple of months into my transition when I decided to come out to Juice. We were drinking Heineken beers and sharing a blunt. Pre COVID. I got the nerve up to tell him, and off we went with questions. The one that stands out the most from that night was. “What man would want to cut his dick off?” I said “Exactly!” I have a bit of a problem with this characterization about Gender Confirmation Surgery. We don’t get our dicks cut off. We repurpose them into a neovagina. I understood what he meant. Folks from the streets can be quite direct. He also asked me if I squat to pee. I, of course, said yes. When I was growing up, having someone suggest that you squat to pee was fighting words. Being a woman in a man’s body is the worst offense that one can commit in man-dom. Juice has since become one of my staunchest allies. His entire family has accepted me.
I remember another time when I was newly out and I told a cis-woman friend of mine about me, and she had questions too. The one that I remember the most is as follows: “So, you like boobies, and you want boobies.” A tad simplistic and crass, but accurate. She never really got on board and we don’t hang anymore.
I play tennis in an LGBTQAI+ tennis league. Truthfully, it's a gay men’s league with one trans woman. When I was new to the league, apparently I was very interesting to the guys. After tennis, we would go out to lunch. On several of these occasions, I would be the center of attention. That works for me, I love to be the center of attention. I got a ton of questions from the guys. Gay dudes are not a shy group by nature, based on my personal experience. They wanted to know about the surgeries I may get. Now, for some folks, these questions are too personal to discuss. I am not one of those people. I said fire away and fire they did. I told them that surgeries are crazy expensive and not covered by insurance in Florida, so while I wanted to fix my birth defects, I may not be able to. Listen, I can see it in your eyes when you look at me. You are dying to know if I am pre-op or post-op. I don’t mind telling folks once, but repeated discussions about my private parts are inappropriate and make me uncomfortable.
Then there was Perry. Perry was my, “ I’ll help you bury a body,” friend. I thought he was the one that would accept me unconditionally. Boy, did I read that one wrong. But early on, when he was trying to find the compassion to accept me, he revealed to me that he liked to date trans girls. He showed me a couple of pictures of some of the women he would date. All super beautiful and young trans girls. I thought, bonus, he is gonna be ok with me. He was not. His question was telling of his total lack of understanding of what it meant to be transgender. He and I had some cursory discussions about my being trans and he didn’t get it. How could this super tough guy be a woman? We don’t hang anymore either. But one interaction sticks out. We were having a tense discussion about me being trans and his lack of understanding. I told him that in five years I will be living full time as a woman. He said, “then what?” Those two words showed how little he knew about being trans. Then nothing, I live the rest of my days as a woman. Nothing more, nothing less. Apparently, trans girls are good enough to date, but not good enough to be friends with. That one stung and continues to sting. I am close with his mom still.
There is one question that I have gotten that I don’t totally have an answer to: “Are you attracted to men?” My sexual attraction is a more difficult thing to address. If you asked me three years ago, I would have said a resounding, NO! But at three years on HRT, the answer is, kinda. I wasn’t attracted to men, until I was. C A has a good piece about this. I think the first time I had to confront this was when I had a man come on to me. Wow, that is affirming. I have recently taken to crushing hard on anyone who is nice to me, man or woman. I am married and I will not be unfaithful so, I won’t let it go past flirting. But I could see myself with a man. The masculine energy is appealing to me. I had a guy tell me that I was f’n hot once. I still find that guy so attractive. I have imagined doing stuff with him, bedroom stuff. I guess that makes me pansexual. I still find women attractive.
I think it is important to be open to helping cis-folks understand what it means to be transgender. I also think that there will be a time very soon, when I will tire of the questions and, just want to talk about other interesting stuff. Being trans is really kind of boring in and of itself. Being a woman can be interesting though. I live, I love, I laugh, and I cry. Let’s talk a little about that, please.
