You are an insult to trans people.
A clueless rich white woman.
We have been assaulted by police. We have been assaulted by johns. We have been violated. We have been violated by the system.
How many sixty-five-year-old white women get killed?
I have heard variations on these themes so many times before it has become a mantra: I don’t represent the trans community. I am an insult to the trans community. I am a clueless rich white woman.
I don’t know what to do but say it again. And again. And again.
I have worked hard. I have been successful. Yes, I am white and privileged. And yes, I am a trans woman.
I am not trying to act as if I am the Mother Teresa of the transgender community. But I am trying to learn as much as I can as quickly as I can. I am meeting other trans women and trans men and parents of teenagers whose children transitioned and were mercilessly bullied for it and daughters whose fathers were too afraid to express their true selves and talking with them and using my show as a worldwide platform.
But yes, talk is sometimes cheap, so I continue to raise money for the trans community because I have the platform to do so, working with corporations with a global presence. I am currently working with MAC to sell a lipstick online under my name called Finally Free. One hundred percent of the proceeds goes to the MAC Aids Fund Transgender Initiative. So far we’ve raised $1.3 million that has been distributed to organizations working on behalf of transgender women and men all over the world. I deserve no pat on the back. All of us can do things large and small. We must remain united and strong to fight and make change.
I believe I know where the protest is coming from. I believe I know who they represent at least partially: African American trans women who are turned down for jobs because of prejudice and are forced to work the streets as sex workers to make a living and often jeopardize their lives. I know the tragic syndrome that too often exists and is little spoken of: a trans woman has sex with a john; words of hate get out in the community that the john supposedly just had sex with a guy who thinks he is a woman but still has a penis so it is perceived as an act of homosexuality; teasing and ridicule follow; the john kills the transgender woman he had sex with to save face and avoid further humiliation and to assert what he thinks is his manhood. Too many trans women’s lives don’t seem to have meaning in our society. Police investigations into their murders are often perfunctory. If a case gets to court, the sentence for the killer is often too light and the hate crime statute is rarely invoked.
I know that as I speak in November 2015 there have been a record twenty-two killings so far this year of transgender or gender nonconforming people, all but three of which—three—were of black or Latinos (the killings will continue at a record rate in 2016). I know of the fear that exists on Six Mile and Woodward in Detroit, or on Santa Monica and Vine in Hollywood. I know Kiesha Jenkins was attacked and shot dead by a group of young men in Philadelphia on October 6, 2015. I know that Tamara Dominguez was run over several times by a truck in Kansas City on August 15.
Can I identify with these victims or any other victim of violence? Of course not. Can I feel horrible pain for them? Yes. Have I talked to those who have been victims? Yes. Do I believe that more has to be done to label these acts of violence as hate crimes? Yes. Am I concerned that police may have a bias against transgender women who work the street? Yes. Do we have to fight through prejudice to help our trans women get jobs? Yes. Should we stop the bullshit and make it effortlessly easy in every state for a transgender woman or man to get their gender marker changed on official forms such as birth certificates and driver’s licenses so there is absolutely no question of what gender they are when they apply for jobs? Yes.
I have absolutely no malice toward the protester with the megaphone. I want to talk to her. I want to hear her story. I want to know more about what I could and should do. I reach out to touch her and hear somebody else scream:
Don’t you fucking touch her! Don’t you fucking touch her!
I still want to talk to her. I still want her to know me a little bit, hear my heart, look into my eyes, even if she does wear a scarf around her face so I will never be able to look directly into hers.
I think about not being able to reach the protester as the bus heads from Chicago to Lamoni. I even try to get her name, but it is a lost cause. I have to let it go because Graceland is now looming ahead.
I look out the window as the bus goes down College Avenue. There’s Patroness Hall and the Floyd McDowell Commons and the Helene Center for the Visual Arts and the Shaw Center. We stop at the Bruce Jenner Sports Complex, which in the aftermath of my Olympic success was named after me. A small plaque
still hangs in the lobby showing me in a red warm-up jacket with black stripes down the sides with the gold medal draped around my neck. My accomplishments are duly noted in black type on an appropriately gold background. I am smiling, but it is a thin smile, almost uncertain, or at least hesitant. Something is off, maybe because I showed the smile so many times when I received plaques. While I was honored to receive them, I also knew they were becoming increasingly meaningless. I wonder now if that smile had become a transparent mask for inner guilt and maybe even embarrassment that I really didn’t deserve this plaque or the gold medal or anything else.
So I smiled. It was all I could do.
Just try to smile.
Some of the buildings look exactly the same. Some have been modernized. Some are new. But the feel is still of a small and humble college of brick and mortar dedicated to its students and, as a church-affiliated school, encouraging a moral life. But whose morals and by what standard? Those who condemn transgender men and women use religion as a cudgel, saw, and machete. The God they see is not benevolent but cruel and vindictive and relentlessly judgmental. They see no beauty in the Bible, only blasphemy.
Yet another reason for my nervousness: what vision of God will emerge when we take the stage, the kind and merciful one or the one hell-bent on destroying me and my fellow trans sisters?
Minutes before I take the stage I see one of my old Graceland football coaches, Jerry Hampton. He has been associated with Graceland for close to seventy years as a student and coach and teacher. He personifies the roots of the school and the kind of sanctuary it provided to a kid from the east looking for something to latch on to. He coached football for twenty-five years, tennis for thirty-three years, and wrestling for twenty-two years (his teams were never defeated in dual meets or tournaments).
I want to renew the goodwill that we felt toward one another when we were here from 1968 to 1973. I suddenly become self-conscious. Is my hair okay? Did I put too much makeup on? Is a white pantsuit too conservative? Should I have stuck to basic black? Or maybe just jeans and a shirt so as to not look too polished?
Maybe Coach Hampton won’t care about the clothes at all. Maybe it will be the disappointment in seeing me no matter how much he tries to hide it, recognizing me from pictures but unable to recognize who I have become. He was my coach, and it is not every day that male athletes who go on to win the Olympics come back as a woman. Jerry offers a glowing smile when he sees me, a prodigal son coming home, if only for a few hours, one who at this point in time should probably be referred to as a prodigal daughter. The smile from Jerry says it all: he gets what I did, and it makes no difference. The link between us, a former player with the former coach, is strong and timeless.
“You’re still here!” I say when I see him, which could be misinterpreted to suggest surprise and shock that he is still alive. I don’t mean it that way. I am just surprised he is still at Graceland after all these years. Tact is not necessarily my strong suit.
“We were bragging on you in my office,” the president of the school, John Sellars, tells me. “We were talking about you as a student and how proud they are of you.”
As a student?
Fine revisionist history.
We walk into the packed auditorium. The applause
is loud, a good sign. “Today Graceland students have a great opportunity to have a discussion about gender identity,” says assistant professor Raquel Moreira in introducing us. “There are no wrong questions. You ask what you feel you should ask.”
How did you go about keeping up your transformation and still acknowledging God in your life?
An honest question well put. It was during a conversation with my pastor about God, and whether he or she would still embrace me, that gave me the courage to transition.
“I got this one,” says the one and only Chandi, commandeering the microphone with one of her patented don’t fuck with me here stare-downs. I look at her. She doesn’t look at me. Her eyes are steely, looking straight ahead. Chandi, who has become one of my fellow sisters on I Am Cait and a great friend, is strong. Chandi brooks no bullshit. Chandi is funny. Chandi is loving. Chandi is an activist. Chandi is outspoken, very outspoken. She has been in the trenches of the trans community for all those years. She has lived it and continues to live it every day.
The question from the student, gentle on the surface, does raise the issue of how God can be in your life when you are a trans woman or man and what you have done is perceived as repugnant and indecent and shameful.
Chandi, remember this is my alma mater.
Protesters screaming at me in Chicago were bad enough.
Well, it actually was hard. I grew up in a very religious family. Many years I heard that my life was an abomination, so I lost touch with God for many years. I had to recognize the fact that God knew who I was before I did, so how can I be falling out of touch with God when he knew before I did? It’s a connection I’ve made that now that I have, I will never let it go again.
She receives vigorous applause. It is a beautiful articulation of what I feel and perhaps many other transgender women and men feel, the cycle of rejection and shame and then the blessing of acceptance. It came for Chandi. It came for me. But it does not come easily for others, whether it’s religion or friends or family.
The words of Kate Bornstein, who speaks next, open my eyes to how lucky I have been to get the acceptance I have gotten and how much of it has come from my station of privilege and celebrity.
Like 99.9 percent of men and women who transition, she had no public relations expert advising her on how to do it. She did what she did with the knowledge that the bonds of family might irreparably rupture.
Another of my sisters on the show, Kate is a year and a half older than me. She has become something of a den mother as I navigate my way, a product of her wisdom and maturity and my insulation in the world of white male privilege.
We relate on a keen emotional level, perhaps because she, too, has had her entanglements with the trans community and refuses to back down. In 1986 she had gender-affirming surgery to become Kate. But she refuses to strictly label herself as a woman and thinks gender labels are a social and medical construct. Her book Gender Outlaw is funny, smart, and provocative without in-your-face provocation. One passage in particular is worth repeating because of her honest clarity, trying to sort out the very concept of man becoming woman and woman becoming man and whether it is truly possible:
I know I’m not a man—about that much I’m very clear, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a woman either, at least not according to a lot of people’s rules on this sort of thing. The trouble is, we’re living in a world that insists we be one or the other—a world that doesn’t bother to tell us exactly what one or the other is.
She calls herself and other trans women and men “trannys.” It has been met with fury by some who think it reinforces the terrible misperception that we are merely playing dress-up, men who wear women’s clothing and women who wear men’s clothing. She does it out of affection. It is a word, not a condemnation. She is trying to take some of the sanctimony out of the sails of the trans community, to let them know that it is okay to have a sense of humor while not dismissing the horrible inequities and tragedies that still exist.
Because you still feel pain in Kate. You still see moments where she is haunted.
She was born into a seemingly perfect nuclear family, growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s—doctor dad, mom who had trained as a teacher, two sons. Kate went to an all-boys school, where the combination of being overweight and Jewish made her an easy target for the viciousness of her peers. She then went on to Brown University, where she discovered a talent for performance. But as she struggled with gender she also struggled with spirituality and whether there was a place that would accept her. She tried the Amish church and Kabbalah and then Scientology.
Scientology seems so totally ill-suited for Kate, given her gender issues. I don’t understand why she did it. I am not sure she understands why she did it, and even when she explains it I am still not sure she understands why she did it. Except that when you are struggling with gender, in Kate’s case knowing she was not a man but unsure she was a woman, you reach for whatever distraction you can, the more intense the distraction the better. But it became hell.
Right before she left she said she was placed on a lie detector for six hours in an attempt to pinpoint her gender identity. She was excommunicated, leaving behind a daughter, whom Kate has not seen for more than thirty years. As she tells the audience:
My daughter is a high-ranking executive in the church of Scientology. To Scientologists my trans-ness is proof that I am an evil person and should not be talked with. So I haven’t seen her since she was nine. She is now forty-two, forty-three years old.
Tears are forming in her eyes. You can feel the pain that will never go away. It isn’t just Kate missing out. It is also her daughter denying herself the pleasure of knowing this kind and remarkable woman—performer, subtle activist without stridency, tolerant of anyone and everyone, gentle, so very gentle, and now grappling with a recurrence of cancer.
She says to the audience that she has not given up the hope of seeing her daughter. But I think she has. I think in her heart is the realization she will never see her again. This is so often the price of becoming a transgender man or woman, something so precious and sacred lost as something so sacred and precious is gained.
She leaves the students with this, as simple as it is complicated, as complicated as it simple:
Look for the heart of the doctrine you are following. If it is at all mean, think twice before following it any further.
Chapter Seven
Zap Zap Zap
ELECTROLYSIS
Plural electrolyses -sez
1a: the destruction of hair roots by an electrologist by means of an electric current applied to the body with a needle-shaped electrode
b: something that hurts unimaginably
c: I deserve it
Here’s the clinical description of how my beard is removed after I move into a tiny house in Malibu in the mid 1980s in my self-imposed exile.
The licensed practitioner, known as the electrologist, takes a metal probe of anywhere from 0.002 to 0.006 inch in diameter and slides it into the hair follicle and the locus of where the hair is formed, what in technical terms is known as the hair matrix. Electricity is transmitted through the probe, first at the lowest setting possible and then increasing, depending on how easy it is to cause sufficient damage to prevent future growth.
There are several methods: galvanic, in which anywhere from zero to three milliamperes is applied in a constant current of voltage and a killing agent of sodium hydroxide is formed at the hair matrix; thermolysis, in which the hair matrix cells are heated with the probe anywhere from 118 degrees Fahrenheit to 122 degrees Fahrenheit to kill them off; and the blend method, in which aspects of galvanic and thermolysis are combined.
In other words, it hurts like hell.
Now consider that there are approximately 30,000 hairs in the average man’s beard. Further consider that many of these hairs are deeply embedded. Also consider that the average length of a session is three hours, and multiply that by weekly sessions for at le
ast two years. Finally consider that each removal is associated with sharp pricking and burning and throbbing.
For me that’s not enough.
I refuse to use any oral or topical analgesics that can significantly reduce the pain. I don’t like painkillers of any kind. I never used them—or any drugs—when training for the decathlon because I didn’t like the feeling they caused over my body, a loss of control.
So this is a form of torture, willing torture. I hate the pain, but I deserve the pain. I deserve it because of who I am, a freak without a home, trapped between the male world and the female world, a hostage of the fame and celebrity and remuneration that has come my way because of the popular perception of my very maleness. If my body looked different when I won the Olympics and wasn’t rippled with muscles, if my face looked different, if my name was different and not the easy cadence of one syllable and then two, if I had won any event at the Olympics other than the decathlon, none of this would have happened. It’s bizarre to consider this, the impact of all these different attributes coming together. Millions look up to me and respect me and maybe envy me. All I can say is don’t: I hate myself with each passing day and take pain not only because I think I deserve it but because maybe it’s the only way I can feel anything at this point in my life in the mid 1980s.
Still in my mid thirties, I am twice divorced. I have become an increasingly distant father to my four children, so consumed and self-absorbed by my gender dysphoria and the increasing realization that I must transition. Sometimes I just want to literally rip the skin off me. Get out of this ridiculous costume of flesh and bone. I feel like I am living on borrowed time with my kids, the contemplation of becoming someone they will not recognize.
I am watching television but I am not really paying attention, maybe because I find myself unable to pay attention to anything. The channels click absently, and I stop at a news segment featuring the executive director of an organization in Orange County that offers services for transgender men and women. I don’t even know there is such an organization. So I call information and ask for the number. I talk to the person I saw on the news. I tell him I have a lot of gender issues and ask if he can give me a referral for any therapists in the Los Angeles area. He obviously doesn’t know who I am, and more obviously he doesn’t care.
The Secrets of My Life Page 11
