Trans Trouble in Tiny Town

Is he/she? Or aren't they/them? Maybe more precisely: what's it to you/youse?

Me, the year I started weightlifting. Here, radicalized by Flip Wilson.

Milton Berle, the Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges, Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club, Laurel and Hardy, Shakespearean theater, the aforementioned Flip Wilson, Jamie Foxx, and the list unfurls, full of men who, digging deep, made a distaff decision to get in touch with their feminine side. Mostly for laughs. But who knows whether that’s mostly or maybe just “mostly”.

It meant little more or less than that. It was a gag, that drag. Broadly drawn caricatures that cut both ways if you thought about it. A paean to women insofar as we imitate that which we admire. But it was also a cut against men. At least insofar as no one really extols the virtues of the inherent dignity of…clowns.

There was always a darker side as well. Characters in pulp fiction that one-up’d the devil in the blue dress motif by having the antagonist, as in one Mickey Spillane potboiler, be revealed to be both deadly and a man disguised as a woman. It should surprise no one living today that by book end she had been shot. As in: dead.

And now, across the U.S., at present, there seems to be an epidemic of trans hysteria, leading to attempts to legislate against it, complete with bans and restrictions on health care. Libraries have become battlegrounds for people who haven’t been in one for years. And the endless and endlessly wearisome Chappelle-fueled pronoun discussion trundles on, and on (The fact that Chappelle skates by the fact that a significant chunk of trans women killed are women of color is also weird.)

[M]ost of the men hiding behind the “homosexual panic” defense, leveraged when they purportedly “discover” that their partners are biologically male, knew that they were with trans women from the get-go…

“It was hilarious.” The story was oft-told and there was an understanding that it was and always would be a hoot. “Your father didn’t know WHAT to do.”

My mother was detailing a story of her dragging my father to a party, and this would have been in DC in the 1950s, where a healthy number of attendees were in drag. Or some version thereof. Not gag drag. The other kind.

“People would try to talk to him and he wouldn’t have it,” she laughed. “He sat on a couch and didn’t move for like an hour.” The punchline was his stereotypically masculine discomfort with men who were bailing on the whole program. And a knee jerk feeling that relaxing here would have some sort of perilous outcome.

Indeed, as the decades have passed and drag, though still its own thing, has slid into trans considerations, Christine Jorgensen notwithstanding, the weirdness that most men used to feel about gay men has moved over to a similar fear of encroachment from trans women. We’ve gone from “I don’t want those gays to be having sex with me” to “shit… ‘she’ looks better than my girlfriend,” a tonal shift that’s both telling and revealing.

The concern is now, at its heart, much less about what will be done to them and much more about what they will do. And what they do is have sex with these women that are better looking than their girlfriends and flip out when they discover that these women are trans women.

Editing a transcript of an interview with Laverne Cox back in 2020 I, unexpectedly, found myself in tears. She was describing a person who she grew up seeing. A trans woman. In a small community in Jamaica. This human being was the butt of a generalized, and yet very specific, abuse. Isolated and alone she was routinely bullied by all and sundry, beatings, rocks and garbage thrown at her, her property destroyed. Just for shits and giggles.

And she hung in there. Cox had referenced her as a source of strength but having been in street fights where I was outnumbered I just multiplied that by an entire town, every day, and while I shared some of the blame for my street fights this person just…left their house. It was heart breaking.

Moreover, Cox had said something that shouldn’t have surprised me but sort of did and that’s that most of the men hiding behind the “homosexual panic” defense, leveraged when they purportedly “discover” that their partners are biologically male, knew that they were with trans women from the get-go.

Which has me Columbo head scratching at all of the energy being put into anti-trans efforts and leading me to one singular conclusion: men trusting trans women is not the issue. Men trusting themselves around trans women is the issue.

Not the red herring of bathroom choice. Or library reading groups. Or even what gay anti-trans folks claim regarding trans people being self-hating/mutilating gay people. None of this.

But a lot of this: what will happen if I get up off of the couch and start talking to one? Along with a perpetual concern of many cis-gendered men: will it “make” me gay if I enjoy the conversation?

In the shifting semantic sands of identity where not even gay sex is a marker of gayness for some, it’s easy to wonder and ask why bother? And why such a long and aggressively screechy stance against men who are tired of the whole man program and identify as women?

“You tell me your daughter steps on to the mat and has to fight a DUDE and you’re not going to be pissed off?!?!” He’s got a Jesus tattoo on his back.

I am totally disgusted by what the internet era has wrought and what seems miles away from what I have come to understand as the key to good dental health. Specifically, minding your own g-ddamned business.

“My daughters all wrestled in high school and had to wrestle men as well,” I said telling the truth about at least three of my state wrestling champion daughters.

“You know what I mean!!!”

This is the argument that seems most sustainably apt and as evidenced by the cis-gendered woman cyclist who quit after being bested by a trans woman, the one that’s gotten the most purchase from people who might have been considered allies. That is: is a trans woman boxer beating up a non-trans woman boxer anything other than sanctioned violence against women?

I don’t know exactly but I zig here instead of zagging and instead recall a conversation I had overheard with one woman proclaiming that she was “OK” with interracial marriages but that it was “the kids” that she was worried about. “Mixed race is just mixed up.” I was in an airport so it was not my conversation but I quickly and correctly concluded that this was a dodge, not an active or real concern, and a cover for an agenda that very much was not OK with interracial marriage.

To wit: I don’t believe the sporting concerns.

Moreover I am totally disgusted by what the internet era has wrought and what seems miles away from what I have come to understand as the key to good dental health. Specifically, minding your own g-ddamned business.

However, in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s there was a cat in the cast of characters that populated the East Village and he was known as Spacely. Spacely, shock of bleached hair, cowboy boots and tight leather pants also sported an eye patch. A hustler himself Spacely, reportedly, had some issues with a drag queen. Issues that resolved themselves with Spacely mocking her and her taking off one of her high-heeled shoes and blinding him, permanently destroying his eye in the process.

That this doesn’t happen way more often is all the proof I need that trans women are deserving of our protection. Graciously offered. Fearlessly given. Expressly manifest in the fact that we’re all G-d’s children.

Are we not?