The Full Spectrum

by David Levithan

  I used to go to all sorts of meetings. GLBT meetings, youth meetings, therapy meetings, transgender support meetings. I went to the meetings; I listened to what everyone had to say. I tried to find my identity, find my self in other people's stories. I listened, and I thought, is this me? Does this describe me? Or am I something else? Sitting in a room just dingy enough to be depressing, just dingy enough for me to notice that it's dingy, I wondered if I wanted to be there, if there was a real need to be there that I just hadn't discovered, or if I was honestly capable of doing things on my own. I went through the steps, because they were expected of me. I found myself wondering how strong of a person I was, and wondered if the act of wondering made me any less strong. A lot of transitioners talk about baby steps forward. Therapists, too. They're crazy for the baby steps, those therapists.

  It's true that there are baby steps. But what no one tells you is that every once in a while those steps will lead you to a huge chasm, a massive change. It's crazy and scary and fun and I recommend everyone try it at least once. The baby steps have built up such a momentum that they carry you, fast and wild, to the other side. And once you're there you realize that, without even being aware of it, you've crossed a divide that can never be uncrossed. Your momentum pushes you forward, and as you're carried off by your maniac baby steps, still trying to take your last looks at where you've just come from, you feel yourself building steam, and you're glad.

  So this past weekend I was in Boston to meet my very first transsexual friends, which I keep saying because I think it's funny, because really, when you look at us as a group—the young transitioners, that is—there really isn't a whole lot of the typical transsexual thing going on.

  I don't even know what that means, really. Typical transsexual. Cate calls it the young, hip, and passable TS, which I guess is what I'm trying to articulate. (Though a caveat of mine would be that I am not 100 percent passable at the moment, damn facial hair still casts ever so much of a shadow. But it's nice to be included, because in the end I know that I definitely will be passable, even pretty.)

  It was a great milestone and no big deal. I'd never actually met a transsexual person (or, I should say, another transsexual person) in my life, and so I kept thinking how this must be a big deal for me. And in some ways it was, but really I just wanted to finally get to hang with my friends.

  We possess a vibrancy in our identity because we have had to earn it, and that essence was, I think, a tangible thing when we were all together. We have had to fight parents and right-wing relatives and stodgy school officials and dumbfuck therapists who have thrown everything they've had into convincing us to walk a “straighter” path, that there was a normality, and that we weren't it. We are at odds with our identity, or at least we have been at some point in our lives.

  We have had to transform ourselves through force of will into who we should have been. We are at once ashamed of what we were, where we have come from, and proud of who and what we are. This makes us, I think, quite beautiful, and it's a rare beauty that I really was able to witness this weekend. It's in the small things—the way Cate's a little punk, Jess's quiet wisdom, Reise's confidence. Good people to be friends with, for sure.

  We all have this same uniformity to our backgrounds, and it makes connection an easy thing. Our antagonism of self, our shame, our pride, the consistency of our stories of self-discovery, our sense of an earned self, make us older than we are, and this, too, is beautiful.

  It's a strange thing, and something I've never been able to articulate well through self-examination, but I think observing others like me from the outside has given me some perspective. There exists a quiet center, a gravity of age underneath the surface of everyone I met this weekend. We are twenty-two years old and ten thousand years old. We have discovered our center of self in our youth when many have never even bothered to locate it, and this makes us sort of powerful. Powerful enough to claim our own lives, powerful enough to risk loss and suffering. It's not an easy thing. I have cried more in the past two days than I have in the past two years.

  The weekend was magnificent in its simplicity. Going to Quincy Market to watch (and talk to) street performers. Getting lunch in some hipster vegetarian place. Having some quesadillas in a bar for dinner. Having some drinks. Our buoyancy is our armor. It protects us from those highs and lows that come so quickly. Keep that sense of humor, 'cause really, come on, you're having a sexchange, how can you not laugh?

  II.

  After Boston, Cate and Jess came back to New York with me to visit the big city. Their city is big, but mine is bigger, mine's the biggest. Of course, I no longer had a place of my own in the big city, so we stayed with Nick, who Cate and Jess adored. A bit about Nick: When I told him—when I came out to him, loath as I am to use the term—he was awesome. I had figured he would be. Although he had the most indescribable funny little expression on his face when I first told him. Nick is the type of guy who strives for politeness and decorum above all things. So I can only imagine that as his synapses were misfiring and his mind was totally blown, his main concern was, I'm sure, to not let me see how shocked he was. I had imparted this fact about Nick to Cate and Jess, and they could see it immediately, could see what I meant about Nick and his politeness in all things. They thought it was sweet. It is sweet.

  So we're there, three girls in New York. I take them to Union Square, Washington Square Park, Chelsea Piers, The Strand, Forbidden Planet, Terra Blues, the cool places that no one ever goes to when they visit New York. Thrift-shopping in the East Village and SoHo and on Bleecker. I am, to my surprise, a size six, or smaller. I have become one of those skinny girls for whom all of those skinny-girl stores are designed. Does this mean I can no longer be grumbly and envious of skinny girls, since I can now also wear the clothes that look cool and are cut right? I shall find other reasons to be grumbly and jealous, I am sure.

  We blend in by standing out, in the proud New York tradition of blending in by standing out. I get clocked a few times, and even Cate gets called “him” once by a Middle Eastern salesclerk (the look on her face is—I guess priceless really is the word. Shocked and pissed and amused all at the same time). Cate wants to visit the Trapeze School in Midtown West, so I take her there, where she promptly runs into a guy who knew her back when she was a guy in college. I guess acrobatics is a small world.

  But the city is nice, and reminds me of what I miss most about it. We get some pizza for lunch, the big gigantic thin-crust slices that can only be done well in the city (it's the water in the dough). I come to the decision that it would be far worse to lose whatever spark or uniqueness I may have by burying it under some lifelong lie. I also come to the decision that many of my profound moments coincide with meals.

  We get to be part of the tapestry that is sold as “young hip America.” Not to sound anti-cynical, because I know cynics are cooler (see what I just did there? Being cynical about being cynical), it really does exist in some places. And New York is nothing if not young and hip. So, sitting in the park at the end of the day, we are just filling in the needed sexual/gender minority slot (the position is also offered to waxed DKNY Chelsea boys, fantastic drag queens from Christopher Street, and punked-out, tattooed butch dykes from the Village). At the fountain sit some hip-hopping young black kids; next to us are these preppy-looking student communists carrying a banner and handing out fliers. A businessman stands in the grass with his shoes off. We are helping to paint that picture, we are that youth culture you've been hearing about. I think how nice it is, at times, to be able to embrace anonymity, or stereotypicality, and how it's a useful ally in transition that isn't available to me in the suburbs. I wonder how Jess does it in Maine.

  I am slowly but surely beginning to grasp the concept of emergence. Is that the defining statement, the transcendent arcing theme of this process I have been so in search of? If it is, should I really be drawing attention to it? By doing so, do I lessen its impact? Emergence—a new state of being forming from what
already exists. The process of taking shape. As important, if not more so, than the end result. The person I am going to be is only now becoming visible from the mold.

  It occurs to me that it is entirely possible that adversity, rather than success, is the true defining element of a life worth living. It is possible that the act of struggle, rather than any sort of outcome, is that which we are measured by. Growth through force of will. An earned life. It's an idea that appeals to me for obvious reasons.

  The fact that I'm aware of my own growth as it is happening is uncommon, I think. Does the fact that mine is a conscious transformation make it any less organic? Does the fact that I blend so easily into the crowd make me any less unique?

  But it's nice. We sit, three normal, transsexual girls, acting casual about acting casual, because we can now. To even be a girl is a victory, even having this small moment is a victory. By being here, we help complete that portrait of the city. By being visible, we push things forward, in our own small way.

  It's funny. I feel sometimes as though I've been caught up in some clockwork whirlwind of my own design. I built it, I set it into motion, and I thought I knew what would happen when I set it loose. But, like with all inventors, inventors in the Frankensteinian sense of the word, when the gears started shifting and turning, I realized I didn't truly understand how wild or whimsical the consequences of my creation would be once loosed upon the world.

  I hope this doesn't sound like regret. It's not. Every day for me is happier than the next. Every step forward brings a calm and contentedness to my heart I have never known. I feel … at ease with myself. I am finding my place in the world, and it is very much a birth. There is a great deal of pain involved, it is hard, it is an endeavor, but the end result is a joyous one. You hope.

  III.

  I should mention my homelessness.

  It sounds dramatic, and really, I would like it to be, in a way. Later on in life it will lend my youth the mythology and theater that everyone so hopes for. I will drop the subject casually at dinner parties with fancy people: “Yeah, for a while in my, oh, my early twenties or so, I lived out of my car for a bit. Oh yeah, it was a heap, a real junker.” I will shrug it off as no big deal in a way that will connote to everyone how much more vividly and intensely I have lived. They will feel foolish about their concern when they see how nonchalant I am about the ordeal. “Sure, kinda rough, but I made do.”

  These people at these dinner parties will marvel at what a strong and interesting person they have met, and their lives will feel momentarily cooler, in the way that comes from brushing up against those with unorthodox pasts and lifestyles.

  But. In the meantime, now, I am homeless.

  I am not dirty or panhandling. I do not fight junkies for a doss out on the street or do anything I would normally equate with being homeless. I have a car in which I keep all of my stuff. My stuff has taken on a much greater importance now, seeing as how I've had to whittle it down to the most essential and most precious in order to fit into a 1984 Volkswagen Golf hatchback station wagon. (The car is so old, it's not even a Gulf. It's a freaking Golf, like the goddamn sport.) I still have a job, I go out, I even have medical benefits. What I do not have is a place to stay, or the means to acquire one.

  Last week, my mother saw me as a girl. She freaked and kicked me out of the house. The irony is that I wouldn't have even needed to stay at her house except that I had just lost my own apartment. I know it's not popular to say that transition is a choice, but I think it is a choice the same way breathing is a choice. You choose to go on, you choose to live. It's harder than it sounds sometimes.

  Other than a place to sleep, my life is very much the same. I am a twenty-two-year-old homeless transsexual. And that is not nearly as exciting as it sounds.

  I am lucky, in a sense, that these circumstances have found me at a point in my life when I am able to deal with them fairly ably. I have worked out most of my past issues of self-loathing, depression, suicidal tendencies (not the band). I have had my moments, but I am over them.

  The inherent flaw of suicide is that it is not a true ending in any sense. Least of all to your problems. Consider pain to be a form of emotional energy that, like any other form of energy, can neither be created nor destroyed. The act of suicide, rather than acting as an end to that pain, instead acts as a conductor. The pain follows the path of least resistance to those who were closest to you at the time, like a bolt of lightning striking a tree during a storm.

  On the surface, a day in the life of the newly homeless is not a terrible departure from that of a normal life. The main difference is the intense and pervading boredom that drives you to occupy your now very long, very empty day.

  Still, even the mundanities of an urban existence are available to me, and today could have been no different from a day off from work to the casual observer.

  Normally I would have a bit of cash on me, and could at least stay in a Motel 6 or something if I so chose, but I spent most of my wad up in Boston, and was inexplicably taken off the schedule at work this week. Hence no money until Sunday, which seems many, many days away.

  I spend the first several hours (the one thing I now have in excess) at the library. Despite my lack of a library card, I manage to talk my way into some computer time there. I check e-mail, post to some friends that I may not be able to be around for a while, do some random layabout Web surfing, and am always eventually informed that I have exceeded my gratis lab time.

  Being in a library, I naturally go in search of some good reading. Read for several hours. Am inspired to write a bit, the way good reading will do, and do so.

  Bored with expanding my mind in a structured environment, I go in search of some slightly more hedonistic instruction, and am off to the beach. I lay out on the hood of my car at the seawall, listening to a classic rock station, the only station that comes in clearly in the '84 Golf. I watch families and young couples go by, thinking how almost like them I could be.

  I have a memory, sudden and vivid, of being in the car with my mother and my aunt. Driving along in relative quiet, my mother blurted out, “Everyone I know right now is in transition,” and I started choking, I was so surprised. My aunt was not in the know yet, no family yet, not at that point.

  This was before I started getting letters in the mail to let me know that I was on a list in the Vatican of special souls to be prayed for, and cards of the Sts. Michael and Gabriel to guide me through what my family considers to be a “bit of a rough patch.” I take some comfort in the knowledge that I am so shocking to my family, my existence so extreme in their eyes, that they felt compelled to notify the Pope and a couple of archangels. To be so removed from them, so far from the same mind-set, only reinforces my belief that I am on the right track.

  So, my mother's blurt. I occasionally forget that for most people not plugged into the transsexual lexicon (my mother included, I would assume), “transition” is, in and of itself, a relatively harmless word. Little “t,” not capital “T,” is how most people see the word.

  So. She went on listing the various transitions of people we know. My aunt with her recent business closing and starting a new career. My mom's friend moving to Florida, another who was taking a big promotion. My brother, newly married and off to start his military career in Kentucky. And I kept waiting, knowing she was going to get to me, and wondering what in the world she was going to say when she did.

  She talked about how I'm in the middle of another move (it looked like I was losing my apartment at the end of that month), and how I'd stepped up the search for a newer, better job.

  I sat in the car, biting my tongue for my aunt's sake, and I couldn't help but think, how interesting. The big transition my life was going through right now, in my mother's eyes. My apartment. My job.

  I remember wondering how my mother could drive with those big blinders on. If she could even see me sitting next to her.

  There is a slight breeze off of the water now, enough to distrac
t from the early-afternoon sun, enough to bring me back to the present moment. The salt air reminds me of home, and I try to remember the first time I realized this, on my first trip home from college. It's always been homecoming, never being away from home, that reminds me of what I miss.

  I lay out until I felt the sun on my face—in the way that happens when you sit out on the hood of a car in the afternoon sun for too long. I sit in the car for a bit, reclining, listening to music, with both doors open to let the breeze pass through. I sit like this for a while, until Myke calls. He asks if I want to help him move some stuff from Lynn's old office to her new one, and maybe grab a bite, around five. Myke is the one friend I was most scared to tell, the one friend for whom I still had to pretend to be a boy. I had never been able to work up whatever it is I work up in me to come out to someone when around him. Courage, perhaps, though the act itself never feels courageous. I agree to meet him.

  I leave the beach, still with some time to kill, and drive to a commuter parking lot, though a different one than the one I spent last night in. I call Jess and Cate, and tell them I miss them, and lie and tell them I'm doing fine. I cry, first at the circumstances, and then at my own self-serving self-pity. They console me, which is what I wanted, and the conversation ends shortly after, with me still missing them and still pitying my sad self, but feeling a little bit better and a little bit annoyed at myself for having cried.

  I call Brooklynn back. Brooklynn the wild child, the party girl. (With no real way to occupy my time, a great deal of my homelessness is occupied by calling friends.) I tell her about my weekend and about my new living arrangements. She is angry with me for not asking someone around here for a place to stay, but she understands a little when I explain how I don't want my asking for help, my circumstances, coloring anyone's reaction to my coming out.