“The key to good dental health,” said the back of a t-shirt with a Raiders logo on the front, “is minding your own business.” The likelihood that the fella sporting it would also be friends with the “Talk Shit, Get Hit” cat we had seen earlier at Slayer’s last concert go around at Oakland Coliseum? High. We hope.
But in another life in another place, my mother was laughing, and laughing. She was telling me a story. I’m unsure of why, or what led up to it. I must have been, I want to say 10? And it was about my father back when, as a kid of divorce, I welcomed stories about the guy who I’d spend parts of each summer with, but who was largely a mysterious void to me.
“So when we were married…we had gone to this party,” my mother’s eyes shined as she danced around the memory. “I was having a great time. Dancing, drinking, laughing, and chatting with people. But your father…” And another light report of laughter. “…He was kind of quiet and withdrawn. I couldn’t figure out why.” My mother, whose friendship palette was always wide and varied, had taken them to a party where a high percentage of the attendees were gay. Not only gay, but men who were dressed like women. Who were hitting on my father.
“I hadn’t even noticed,” she said. “I was just having a good ol’ time.” He eventually said that they had to go and they did. His discomfort here, played for fun, had marked him as a figure of fun. Like men who didn’t know how to cook or sew or do any number of traditionally “non-masculine” things, the women in my family, while liking men who were manly men, also had an expansive understanding of what that meant, and encouraged me to be...different.
“I think it is pretty clear that Eugene Robinson is a domestic abuser,” is what it said, and it took me awhile to make sense of it.
So I had resolved to never be unseated from any comfortable place I happened to be sitting as far into my future as I could see. And on the cusp of the ending of the Olympics, bubbling out of what felt like nowhere to me, but which apparently has been part of a wide and continuing conversation, some trans outrage.
“This GUY in the Olympics who wanted to weight lift as a woman…” He trailed off into what I believe he expected would be assent.
“And….?
“And you have to admit that this is crazy.”
“You’re a licensed medical professional?”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to….look, it’s clear to me that trans people are mentally disturbed.”
“Says you.”
He starts sputtering. His lower back is emblazoned with a knocked out tattoo that’s tough to read until it comes into focus: JESUS. That’s not me responding to what his tattoo says. That’s what it says.
He lays the claim that biology is destiny and anything else is perversion. An attitude also shared by his ideological opposite, and one of the original Stonewall warriors, first line fighter for gay rights, Jim Fouratt who believes transgender is some version of self-mutilating gay self-hatred.
But my understanding is, or endeavors to be, expansive: “what do you care?”
“It affects me!”
“You’re a heterosexual man who is a long time married, to a woman…where’s your dog in this hunt?”
“OK. So you’re saying you want your daughters competing against them?”
My daughters, all wrestlers, have competed against biological males before. And beaten them. And I say so.
“OK, so maybe you’re different.”
…“[H]er roommate started pushing to ‘test out’ her new pussy.”
“What happened to the good ol’ American MO of minding your own business?” I lay out, something I sort of lifted from Screw publisher Al Goldstein: QTAT, or Quick Time Across Town. If something doesn’t keep me from making quick time across town, I couldn’t be arsed, as my Brit friends say.
Heads shake all around. But I’m the oldest guy there and the reality is that the way that the Internet has distorted how we talk to each other is in full effect. Everyone has an opinion that apparently matters. MySpace becomes every space and if people are putting it out there we’re all feeling entitled to put it out there too. Because we live in a largely consequence-free universe.
Except if you’re trans. And then you are running the very serious risk of being murdered by a heterosexual man who had previously been attracted to you. No matter how many jokes Dave Chappelle tells. Which seems to be a consequence that counts.
And while I understand to a certain degree the world being slow to buy-in, I try to push beyond the “real men/women vs trans men/women” divide and state, unequivocally, that I wish everyone was ok with the “trans” portion of the equation. The third sex portion. People who are misgendered and choose to do something about it. I think it’s a bold choice and, ridiculous bathroom arguments aside, it’s really none of my business what you do with, or without, your privates.
“I think it is pretty clear that Eugene Robinson is a domestic abuser,” is what it said, and it took me awhile to make sense of it. The writer was a promoter. Make that a sketch promoter, in a sketch venue. She came up to me post-show and demanded I sign a contract for a lesser amount of money than the first contract had stated.
I demurred. That’s what we have a booking agent for. “Yeah, I’m not signing that. You’ll have to deal with our agent.” Which is why people in bands have agents. To ford over difficult moments like these, the talent deflects and the agent can do what agents do: “he’s not signing anything AND you’ll pay the full fee.”
She steps in front of me, brandishing the contract and repeats her demand: “you’re not going to do the unprofessional thing and not sign this…” She’s blocking my path out of her sketch club and we are now chest to chest. The sketch transwoman promoter is now speaking in an unmistakable language to anyone who has ever owned a pair of testicles. It’s the language and the promised delivery of whatever a threat turns into when it runs out of words.
“If you don’t step aside so I can pass,” I say. Calmly. Quietly. “You will see ‘unprofessional.’” So she steps aside. She goes home. Hits the Internet, and accuses me of being a domestic abuser. What she doesn’t do? She doesn’t call our agent.
I was tempted to have a grievance battle and raise her gender privilege argument with my race privilege argument, as she was White. But feeding the monster the Internet has wrought seemed wearisome to me. So I just spell out the facts and end with a public request for the still unpaid funds. Which stops it all.
OXBOW never played another show for her again, nor did I ever hear or see her again. But I think of the exchange often and how sometimes even minding your business, which I was definitely doing in my refusal to sign that contract, can sometimes keep you from making Quick Time Across Town.
Which is, just to be clear: a bad thing.
But refusing to be bulldozed by someone whose gender had very little to do with how I was choosing to respond when it comes to cash, a good thing: right?
Later a friend and I were walking around North Beach in San Francisco. We stopped to say hello to a friend of hers. They had a whispered conversation of a certain amount of urgency. After she left I asked after her what the deal was.
“Her roommate is trying to fuck her.”
“And?”
“Well they’ve been roommates for the last 10 years but after she went through her gender reassignment surgery and was all healed up, her roommate started pushing to ‘test out’ her new pussy.”
File under: yet something else I’d never have thought of.
“So she’s looking for a new place to live.”
I sighed then, and I’m sighing now remembering it.
People…