When we got home, Wolsey confirmed to me that the people in the store had recognized we were together and they were reacting weirdly. We both agreed to never go back and we haven’t stepped through those doors in the three years since.
I immediately worried that my holding his hand had set it off. Definitely an example of the new “social decorum” expected from those outside of our circle of friends. I think this was when I first made an active attempt to not make Wolsey uncomfortable with PDA’s. There were a couple of other incidents that reinforced this, but definitely this was one of the most glaring.
Fast forward another three years. Wolsey has loosened up a little bit on his worry and I have tightened up a lot. We do hold hands occasionally, when it appears safe, and we are not in unfriendly territories.
I now look at cisgender heteronormative couples and smile at the thought that they have no idea the privilege they have to be able to run around showing affection to each other.
Wolsey’s Perspective Now:
Appearing queer in public isn’t a new phenomenon for me. As a teenager in the 80s, I had been open about being bisexual and dated both men and women. My friends included gender nonconforming folks and a lot of punk kids.
To say we drew attention in our small town would be an understatement. Between my dating women occasionally, and being very alternative looking, I got targeted pretty regularly. Just holding my girlfriend’s hand, while looking that feminine, was cause for shouted slurs, hate and threats.
The biggest, most dangerous response I had ever encountered wasn’t even with a significant other. It was with a few of my friends on my 19th birthday. We had gone to Denny’s so I could get a free dinner. I don’t know if they still do that, but back then it was a thing.
My best friend Wendy went everywhere with me. It was the 80s, and I wore a dog collar, with my spiked hair and big combat boots. Attached to that collar was a metal dog leash. Wendy had been physically attacked and beaten up, and often wanted to hold on to my leash. She didn’t say it, but I always suspected it made her feel safer to have me close at hand. I was the far more aggressive of the two of us and more likely to fight back.
We had traveled this way for months around our town, and nobody had said a word. Then we went into Denny’s. In a small town with nothing going on, Friday night at Denny’s was packed. It was midnight, and the crowd was lining the walls waiting for tables.
As we walked in, something was different. As we walked past the people to the end of the line, a woman held up her baby, and loudly said, “Say Dyke! Say Dyke honey!” That set off the laughter.
The comments went downhill from there. My male friends were called “faggots” and we were called “dykes.” All of my friends on this trip were straight except me, actually. That didn’t really matter to the crowd.
We finally got a table, and things seemed to calm down, until the frat boys at the table next to us leaned over to say, “So, can I ask you a question?” There is literally nothing good that has ever come out of a comment like that. It’s always a launching point for something invasive or insulting.
He pressed on, and asked, “Are you like this because you fucked your fathers?” People at other tables leaned over to high five him. My recollections were that we were far wittier than the drunk frat boys, and they bowed out of the conversation.
Then, a blond college gal walked over and slammed her plate of food on the table saying, “Here’s for your dyke dog.” The joke was on her, and a new grand slam was way too much for a group of homeless kids. We all ate it, and laughed at her for buying it.
Our buoyancy was aggravating to the crowd. Things went from adversarial to aggressively threatening fast. We paid our bill, and I walked out expecting a fight.
That was the first time I ever got a front row view of how a crowd of people can turn into an ugly mob. We got to our cars, and got away. I’m still positive we were damn lucky not to be beaten up. This crowd was sure they had found a bunch of lesbian and gay kids, and wanted us dead. They made that clear.
I’d like to say that’s the only time, but it wasn’t. For a while in my teens I was Schrodinger’s gender, but always queer. I tried to dress as a boy, as if that could wipe away those double X chromosomes. My youth helped some, but not always. If I was with a boy, I was a gay faggot. If I was with a girl, I was a dyke. It made being in public unsafe, and I was in more than a few fights.
That faded away when I started dating my husband, Lucky. He’s 6’2” tall, and I looked feminine in comparison, no matter what I wore. I faded into the straight masses, and the violent anti-gay threats stopped.
This meant when I started presenting as male, I was all too aware of what could happen. At 5’6”, I was also aware that men tend to be more than happy to target you if you are small.
Lucky was undeterred. He was willing to hold my hand and be all out gay in public no matter what. His fearlessness was frightening. I remember being in Ellensburg, Washington at a McDonald’s. There were a bunch of good old boys getting out of their big 4 x 4 trucks. I had stopped holding my husband’s hand out of habit.
It was the first time Lucky had ever dealt with that. I had to have a discussion when we got home that it didn’t mean I didn’t love him. It was because I couldn’t tell who was on team LGBTQ, and who was likely to actually hurt us.
Being gay in public brought me right back to my teens. Sure, marriage equality had passed, but there were definitely some folks that were angry as hell about it. Apparently my being married was a big threat to them personally.
Lucky had never lived out and queer before, and he was in a different position than me. He’s 6’2”, and when he gets his dander up, folks don’t want to fight him anymore. I’m 5’6”, and even in a full-on fight, angry men sometimes don’t really find me that threatening.
Of all the changes that came with my transition, this was the sticking point for my husband and me. Twenty years of being in a heterosexual marriage with the freedom to hold your spouse’s hand every day without repercussions was something he enjoyed. To find out that I might be unwilling to take that risk as a gay couple everywhere we went, was a hard reality for him.
I am always transgender and in a gay marriage, but sometimes I just want to get a cheeseburger without opening myself up to violent bigots. I also don’t want to always risk winning the bigot lottery, where it’s just my luck to get the super violent guy that isn’t content with throwing a few slurs at us, and instead wants to kill us.
My husband’s temperament is to fight. He’s willing to fight any injustice at any time. His ideological view of the world, and his black and white view of what’s right and wrong, is one of the reasons I married him.
He had always known a lot of LGBTQ folks, but it’s a big difference to be on the outside watching it, then to suddenly find yourself inside the line of fire. I am proud of him getting his bearings and wanting to fight so hard every single day. For him, he’s willing to fight to get that cheeseburger every time we go out.
This was literally the only contentious issue we had in my transition. It was not my deepening voice, my beard, or my masculinity. It was our differences in opinion on when it’s safe to hold hands.
To this day, we still haven’t totally solved this issue. I hold his hands more, and he is more understanding when I don’t. In a perfect world, we’d be able to hold hands everywhere, and not have these risks.
Chapter Seven:
To Deny the Past or Not?
I re-invented my image so many times that I’m in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.
—David Bowie
From the Accidentally Gay Blog: Working out boundaries
Posted on October 5, 2013
I realize my post from earlier today was a bit maudlin, but I would like to say we had a great conversation overall with Wolsey. Another portion of that conversation I had with Wolsey in the car ride home from Ikea was about boundaries, mainly about what he felt comfortable with me ta
lking about publicly about our relationship pre-transition.
To give a little feedback, I am on several FTM blogs/Tumblr’s/etc. and some of the posts indicate that the transitioning husband (and wife sometimes) did not want their significant other of several years to keep pictures or talk publicly about [them] before they transitioned. Basically, they were upset that their significant other wanted to keep pictures public, talk publicly or in any way reference about the relationship pre-transition.
First, I want to say I understand why some people who transition want to do so in a stealth manner. They are in a situation that could be violent, they could lose their job or perhaps they just don’t want to acknowledge it. I completely understand that viewpoint.
As the spouse of a transitioning person, I don’t think it’s very fair to have someone who is not transitioning not only have to adapt to the changes of the transition, but not acknowledge or even celebrate the relationship that happened before the transition. Not only does that person have to grieve the loss of the dynamics of the previous relationship, but they have to burn the memories of that relationship.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the transitioning person feels this way, so I got worried about how Wolsey felt. I am reluctant to even consider not talking about Wolsey being my wife for 20 plus years. I have a ton of pictures of him then, some of them were even quite sexy.
We talked about it. I suspected he would be OK with me talking publicly and still keeping pictures and stuff like that. He confirmed that he has no problem with it. Then again, he isn’t trying to stealth and is fairly loud about being someone who is transitioning. He especially believes this is needed to give outside people more context about transitioning people. The more outside people see that, the more they realize that people that are transgender are not weird, unusual or anything other than their neighbors, family and friends.
I don’t know how I would have felt about getting rid of all the photographs, but I was definitely willing to delete the super sexy ones. He reiterated he was fine with it. That is who he was for 40 plus years.
This helped a lot with my anxiety yesterday. It really offset the gut punch I had felt a few minutes earlier. I am very happy that I am married to a hot guy, but I am still allowed to show off and be proud I married a hot woman 21 years ago. I was worried that he would be uncomfortable with old pictures of himself, but the opposite seemed to be how he felt. It felt good to know I didn’t have to bury my history as I head into the new part of my life with the best spouse in the world.
Lucky’s Perspective Now:
When Wolsey decided to transition, we had already had about 21 years of marriage under our belts as husband and wife. We had been through the normal conflicts and tribulations as a heterosexual married couple. We had made decisions about having kids, about religion and about what we wanted to do when we grew up.
At first, I never even considered there might be a question about our history as a couple during his transition. My innate desire to be loud and obnoxious hid any obvious reasons for me. I didn’t care that people turned their heads when they saw us. I definitely wouldn’t care if they knew that we were a normal (relatively speaking) heterosexual couple at one time. I didn’t even think there might be a problem.
That’s when I did some research and discovered some of my cisgender privilege had been showing. Don’t get me wrong, I understood and believed in transgender people having equal rights, because they are the same as us. However, because this was the first time around them in the flesh, and not in some theoretical situation, I began to notice how they were treated. I frankly didn’t realize how many lost jobs, threats of violence, social ostracizing and other villainies are perpetrated on transgender folks.
I began to do my research after Wolsey came out and was flabbergasted. I was shocked that the news wasn’t reporting nightly on the hate crimes occurring regularly. I was extremely surprised that when a transgender person was caught “passing” (meaning that outsiders believed they were cisgender) the repercussions could be both physically and economically violent.
I read about a trans woman who had worked at her job for years, and when it came out that she was trans, she was fired, harassed and beaten up. The interview with her was enlightening, and even she was shocked at the pushback. She believed it was because a few of her colleagues had hit on her, and when they discovered she was transgender, they believed she was intentionally fooling them. No wonder people hide their pre-transition lives.
I researched more on how other transgender people handled the transition, and what worked. I found more and more people who decided to drop everything and move to a new place, under a new name, and never acknowledge their pre-transition lives. They would move across the country, and look for people that might be able to give them a job reference in their post-transition selves that mimicked what they did in pre-transition just because they were scared of someone calling their old boss, and finding out that they had transitioned.
What shocked me more was hearing that it wasn’t just employers that would react like this when they found someone was transgender. I read about landlords who would kick tenants out, or at the very least make the tenants lives so uncomfortable they would move. I read about doctors, dentists and other people important to health and wellbeing denying care.
Then I began to understand why someone wouldn’t want to acknowledge their life before their transition, why they would move to another city, in another state, and not even contact their family.
I need to say that I completely understood why someone would want to do that. I only had to watch the last couple of months with Wolsey and see how everyone just focused on his pre-transition identity to begin with. This was coupled with the violence I was reading about being perpetrated on the trans community when people discovered someone wasn’t cisgender. I understood why Wolsey might want to dump his identity.
It wasn’t until I read some of the spouse viewpoints (women who stayed with trans ladies, since I still hadn’t found any sources for men who stayed with their trans men spouses). They were upset that not only could they not acknowledge their partner’s past, but they couldn’t acknowledge their own past. This resulted in more than a small percentage of break-ups for those couples.
That is probably the first time I realized the consequences and long-term effects of Wolsey’s transition. Up until this point, my number one, two and three concerns were Wolsey’s transition, and what he needed. For me it had become what he needed physically, emotionally and financially. Whatever he need didn’t matter because I would get it for him.
It hit me hard then. What would become of my life? Do I get to talk about the last 20 plus years of marriage, or do I need to shed it like the skin of a lizard? I wasn’t even sure how Wolsey felt about this.
We have always had a little bit of a different opinion about disclosure. Before his transition, when I was swaddled in my cisgender, heteronormative, white, male cocoon I believed everyone should disclose their gender identity with a partner. I believed it wasn’t fair to the non-transgender partner to not tell them. Wolsey had always taken the opposite view. He believed that if it was short term, or a one-time situation, the partner did not need to know the transgender person’s history.
In my defense, I had erroneously assumed it wouldn’t matter to the partner what the transgender person’s history was. I wouldn’t even think twice because a woman is a woman. However, I knew people could be sensitive, so I thought that was the best course of action. Reading the support sites definitely clued me in that I was wrong, and I could see why disclosing is not necessarily the safest, or most desirable option for the transgender person.
I then started thinking about what that meant for my life. Not being able to acknowledge that I had a beautiful wife, that I would have to hide 20 plus years of photos, and edit 20 plus years of stories to make sure to change Wolsey’s gender and any markers in the story that indicated his pre-transition status.
I stewed on i
t for a day or two. I always knew this wouldn’t be a make it or break it moment. I wanted Wolsey, and this wouldn’t dissuade me from being with him. However, it did make me wonder how easily I could change my history to fit the narrative if that was what he wanted.
I spent the next week earmarking thousands of photos trying to make it easy to remove, and possibly delete, that part of our lives. I had a lot of photos that Wolsey took for me that were adult in nature that I moved to a different folder. Those I figured were definitely gone. I would have to go through the rest of the earmarked photos with Wolsey to determine what he wanted to keep.
I watched him for that week. He was loud, proud and out. Well maybe not as loud as I can be, but he never shied away from being open about his pre-transition status and where he was going. While I was completely prepared to cover everything, I was starting to hope that maybe he didn’t want to go that way.
Wolsey and I were at lunch and I just asked him straight up what he wanted to do. Did he want me to cover everything before the transition? I was more than happy to do that for him. I tried to make it sound like this was nothing and it didn’t bother me. I even posted it that way in my blog, but I was a bit disingenuous. I was accepting of going in that direction, but I was hoping he didn’t want to be stealth.
He confirmed he didn’t want to live his life in secret. He even confirmed he was totally accepting and fine if I kept those adult pictures of him. I suspect partially it was because he didn’t have the same dysphoria that a lot of transgender people had. He knew he was always a man born in the wrong body, but it didn’t cause him the same pain it did others. Looking at pictures of himself pre-transition didn’t bother him at all.
I breathed a sigh of relief at not having to alter the story of our marriage previous to the transition. I didn’t feel bad about the energy spent to prep myself to change if he did want to go that way. I think it was a good exercise in exploring myself and if I would be OK with it. I found I definitely would be OK with it.
Acidentally Gay Page 8
