The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

S. Bear Bergman

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781551523514
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios LGBT

Lambda Literary Award finalist

Alternately unsettling and affirming, devastating and delicious, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You is a new collection of essays on gender and identity by S. Bear Bergman that is irrevocably honest and endlessly illuminating. With humor and grace, these essays deal with issues from women's spaces to the old boys' network, from gay male bathhouses to lesbian potlucks, from being a child to preparing to have one. Throughout, S. Bear Bergman shows us there are things you learn when you're visibly different from those around you—whether it's being transgressively gendered or readably queer. As a transmasculine person, Bergman keeps readers breathless and rapt in the freakshow tent long after the midway has gone dark, when the good hooch gets passed around and the best stories get told. Ze offers unique perspectives on issues that challenge, complicate, and confound the "official stories" about how gender and sexuality work.

S. Bear Bergman 's first book was Butch is a Noun (Suspect Thoughts Press). Ze is an activist, gender-jammer, and author of two books and three award-winning solo stage shows. Bergman recently relocated to Burlington, Ontario, from New England.

The Velveteen Tranny

I. Theory

I think it would be a very nice thing, to be real.

I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been real, and so it’s a bit hard to say. Perhaps there are things about being real that I wouldn’t enjoy. But considering the tone and flavor with which I am generally, and have across my lifetime been told I am not real, I assume it must be better. Or, at the very least, that there must be some benefit, if only because so many people think it’s better than being. . . the things I’ve been. Not fake, quite. I’m rarely told I’m fake, but I can’t imagine why since it seems clear that fake is the opposite of real. Doesn’t it? Never having been real, again, I am not sure.

I wasn’t ever a real girl, except, I think, when I was so young that I wasn’t myself at all, just an extension of my parents’ projections about me. I do have photos of myself in dresses with pinafores and petticoats, and I am certainly smiling pink, gummy smiles in them. But it’s not long before, in the pictures, I am wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, or grubby shorts showing filthy knees from playing explorer games in the vacant lot with the kids on my street. I played basketball with Michael Carroll, who was fifteen when I was five and must have grown up to be a great dad, as patient as that boy was. My realness never took hold, as a girl, despite all the ways anyone ever tried to make me more real from the outside in, as though if enough eye makeup were applied it would eventually sink in through the skin. I tried and failed, and tried some more.

That narrative is only a little interesting at this point; only useful as a cautionary tale to parents who keep trying to paint some normative gender on their children in the hopes that it will make them more acceptable to the rest of the world. It won’t. Please, stop trying. It doesn’t make the rest of the world like us any better, because they can almost always still see that we are somehow, ineffably but unmistakably, not real, and now not only that but we can hardly recognize ourselves. It’s better for everyone if you can start getting used to your gender-non-normative child now. If you can’t manage to buy him a tutu or her a tool belt, that’s okay for the moment, but please at least invest in lots of art supplies and science toys, and stop trying to hand your boy a truck when all he wants is a doll, or your girl a pair of dress-up angel wings when any idiot—and you’re not an idiot, are you?— can see that she’s long on grounding and low on gossamer. If, as children, we can’t be real to the world, it’s always way easier if we can at least be real to ourselves at home as much as possible.

Eventually, I was a butch. I was never a butch lesbian or a butch woman, though I probably was a butch dyke for a bit there, but only situationally. I always said that butch was a gender all its own—yes, a noun—and I was pretty clear that that was me. I was a masculine female, a he-she, an egg timer in a forest of hourglasses, and for a time I did okay as a butch. People believed in it to a degree and let me keep my noun on credit, but heads were shaken, and plenty of people told me I wasn’t a real butch. Real butches always and only love femmes, and while I adore femmes and have loved several in my life as well as I could, I didn’t love only femmes. I melted over other butches. I cruised burly, grey-haired butch daddies twice and three times my age, butches who had kids older than me. Butches who had boots older than me. And I had no skills in the trades, and I couldn’t fix a car. One year, for my birthday, I received a dozen tire gauges from various people as gifts because I thought the channel sewn into my friend Kage’s mechanic’s shirt was for a pen, and everyone thought that was so funny they all got me tire gauges (which, it turned out, is what the spot is really for). I still have one of them in a drawer of keepsakes, but I’ve never learned how to use it, like all the real butches. I never wanted a motorcycle or a muscle car or a fishing pole or a motorboat; never worked construction or painted houses. I usually took care of kids or fiddled with computers for work, and the one appropriately butch job I had was working the door at a gay bar, a job I got because my conflict de-escalation skills were better, in ratio to my specific mass, than any of the other applicants.

But as a butch I was kind of . . . girly. I didn’t like to camp or hunt, I didn’t drink beer, and my pool game is a disaster. I liked to read and write and brunch and shop and cry and go to musicals. I was scared of horror movies, and my favorite part of the Super Bowl was always the commercials. My friends liked me anyhow, certainly, but they took these opportunities to tease me about what a real butch I was definitely not when they arose, as with the tire gauges. Or my haircut, which I wore in a flippety Prince Valiant style for some time (because it fell nicely into place without having to put product in it and, on a good day, made me look a little bit like Joey Lawrence). But my buzzed and butched and flat-topped friends gave me so much shit about it, asking when I was going to get a proper haircut for a real butch.

I tried, I swear I did. Not as hard as I did at being a girl, because I was more stubborn and less dependent on the approval of my criticizers for things like food and shelter, but still. The thing is, it wasn’t really the activities or the hairstyles that got me in trouble, that prompted people to comment on how real I was not—those were just the signifiers, the concrete, recognizable things they could point to. But unlike my girlness, their unsettledness ran deeper. There was some discomfort with my performance failure but, I now believe, a much greater amount of discomfort with the fact that I didn’t really seem to be working hard to do it right. I wanted to be real, but not fakely real, only really real—real in myself and also recognized as real.

It gets so complicated. Being real, being read as real, being real to myself. Are we all more or less performing something we hope reads as a workable gender, praying no one notices how we’re really, seriously, irrevocably fucked up? Hiding carefully how far we have strayed in our hearts from the ideal that gets packaged and sold as realness? Thinking about how much we would cheerfully pay to get a few days off to go somewhere nobody knows us and indulge in all our unsanctioned realnesses without anyone there to drag us back to reality? I think we are.

And then I went and made it all worse. When I finally stepped back and looked at all the pieces, trying to figure out which gender really seemed like the best fit, the one most satisfyingly for me, I kept circling back to faggotry. Queer men can be fashionable and cry while simultaneously being burly and wearing suits. They probably—we probably?—have the greatest amount of freedom to shake up gender into something I find really fun, as long as we’re prepared to pay for it with our lives, if necessary. No queer man has ever looked at me funny when I said I collected vintage cufflinks, which is pretty well at the intersection of all of the identities I have ever had (and has gotten me laughed out of more than one conversation). For a long time I said that I was definitely never going to transition to male, because I wouldn’t be any better at being Man than I was at being Woman; that if I transitioned I would have to buy tutus, so I might as well save the money and be a gender outlaw in my original sex and butch gender. Certainly I was very practical. Certainly I understood where in the world I stood the best chance of eventually gaining realness, and so I publicly resolved—in writing, even—that I would remain firmly situated in the previously agreed-upon location of butch.

But I didn’t quite stay there. Partly, I couldn’t seem to make my point about butch as a gender, and people kept insisting I was a butch woman or, more problematically, a butch lesbian. More than one charming femme actually said to me, “I’m so glad you’re staying a lesbian,” and each time my heart sank; each time I felt like I had been erased. Also, as it turned out, I was rather more suited to the tutu style of gender variance than the carburetor style. I was more Queer Eye for the Straight Guy than The L Word by a factor of, uh, kind of a lot. And so, after some conversation internal and external, I shuffled just a tiny bit there over the line of masculinity into something closer akin to manhood, hoping for authenticity, hoping for my chance to become real. Hoping to finally find a quiet place of gender I could ease into.

Man, did I ever not find it (pun intended). I didn’t know, before I made my little shuffly hopeful move, about the great and terrible truth of transgender life, which is that they will never let you be real, ever again. Not even if you absolutely promise and completely swear to follow every directive from the Home Office immediately upon receipt. I didn’t know it when I signed on—maybe I should have, but I didn’t—but the transperson is always a knock-off, as in, “Why would you date a fake man when you could have the Real Thing?” (strut, strut, posture, posture), and ze is always the location of deceit.

It must be true, or people wouldn’t respond the way they do. Kate Bornstein famously asks, when people ask if she’s had the Surgery, if they mean her nose job. She jokes about it because she has been talking about transfolks, and her own trans experience, in popular culture longer and better than anyone else, and after the millionth iteration of some stranger deciding it’s okay to quiz you about your genitals after thirty seconds of acquaintance, let me tell you . . . if you don’t make a joke you’ll scream. I could recount all the impertinent, intrusive, or arrogant questions here, but they’re endless and boring and I frankly don’t want to give anyone any ideas. What I will say is that, when I mention that something might be a personal question, people tend to say that they’re just really curious. They say this in an innocent tone of voice as though surely I can understand, and furthermore, why, I should be grateful. Grateful, I say, that they want to know more about the life and times of the transsexual; grateful that they’re not running away shrieking or throwing rotten fruit. If I push the issue and suggest that querying people on their history, former name, surgical status, and so on is rude, my interlocutor gets angry, accuses me of being oversensitive, or asks me if I have something to hide. Which is unfair, and also tiring.

The truth is that I might not mind as much if I didn’t understand so well what was going on. I might be willing to believe that there was some sort of innocent educational journey at work every single one of those times, if I hadn’t already answered those questions over and over only to discover that each of my questioners was using the information to decide whether or not I was real. I say that my name is Bear, and when I am asked if I have changed my first name to Bear, I say no, it’s my middle name. Not real enough. When people learn that my grandmothers still call me Sharon, it’s further proof: not the real deal. These judgments are made about surgeries, about hormones, about sexual orientation, and people who ask them—the same people who moments before claimed the need for my tender educational mercies—are now the gender judge and jury.

Transpeople lose a number of things when we transition. We can lose family, friends, jobs, children, lovers, and money. But the most difficult thing for me to lose has been veracity. I was already used to not being real, but now I don’t even seem to be trustworthy. I’m not a reliable reporter about my sex or my gender or even my own name; I cannot be trusted to be my own expert. In each of those querying moments, what I am being asked for are details so someone else can make the final decision—am I real yet? So they can decide what they want to call me or how they want to refer to me or if I deserve the pronouns I have requested (and therefore asserted to deserve). I’m only truthful if they decide, after assessing the facts, that my actions mean I deserve the identity that I am claiming. I only get to be real if they say so.

It’s tempting to make the comparison to the Velveteen Rabbit, and tidy as well—and you know essayists; we love to wrap up a good metaphor with a pithy ending. Here I just say that I know I’m real, that I believe in it fully, and if I can become real to just one person it’s enough to sustain me. But unlike the Velveteen Rabbit, who was redeemed from death through love but never allowed to be near his love again, it takes more than one person believing in my realness. It takes cultural change. And so this essay doesn’t really end as much as it stops. I’ll let you know if I ever get more real.

II. Practice

I had a long, difficult conversation with my old friend and mentor John last year. I was talking about someone important to me who had a new lover, and I referred to him as her boyfriend. John stopped me mid-sentence to ask, “A transsexual guy?”

I’m afraid I kind of lost my composure. I snapped back, none too kindly, something snotty like, “Are you seriously asking me about the genitals of some dude you don’t even know?” and we let the matter drop and went for lunch. But as is so often the case with people to whom we are close, we circled around back to it again in our way, after our feelings had cooled a little, after I was ready to talk to my old friend as a friend and not as a full-time professional gender warrior (which is, or should be, the right of friends). After a few weeks, he sent an email with a chatty first paragraph and then, after a tentative opening, he wrote this:

At the baggage carousel, I was, indeed, asking about the genitals of someone dating [name redacted]. There are all kinds of reasons why my question was socially problematic, and deserving of a dismissive or indignant response—but your particular indignant response, as I read it, seemed to have as its subtext, “Why on earth should genitals matter in the least?”

I know full well that sex and gender are different things and I’m well aware of, and fully support, the deconstruction of those parts of the sex-gender dynamic that are constructed, which is to say almost all of it. But genitals seem to matter a lot to people who have them, regardless of their sex or their gender. Which means, I think, that they must matter in any discussion of a human relationship between people with genitals.

Okay, genitals are private, and as a rule ought not to be asked about. But, but—when we wish to know or talk about a person’s life and relationships, do we not have to basically agree on the terms of the discussion in order for the discourse to have any meaning at all? To the extent that the LGBTQ community is laboring righteously to change the terms of these discussions, I’m all for it. I’m decades past thinking that genitals determine anything, necessarily. But that’s not to say that they don’t matter, sometimes a lot. They can’t possibly be off the table entirely, can they? I just don’t see how that’s possible. The sex-gender discussion, obviously, is not in a settled or stable state. As long as that’s true, doesn’t everything have to be on the table (as it were) while we sort it out? Which means, I think, that my question was not as out of line as your response seemed to suggest.

It’s half the problem with old friends, I’m afraid. They really call you on your shit. And they make it difficult to sidestep the complex parts of the question by dismissing the entire thing on a bad premise. It’s not like answering the questions of a university undergraduate, in which I can address only the parts of the question I want to discuss. On the other hand, with old friends I can talk about things I feel, and ways in which I’m tender, not just what I have studied or can prove. I wrote back:

Okay, that’s fair. Here’s the thing:

When I identify someone’s gender (with a pronoun, name, or other gendered words like “boyfriend”) and then someone inquires about genitals, here’s the subtext I hear: “Is this person really a man? Help me assess.” And that’s complicated. Granted, you and I have a long and fairly close history, in a somewhat odd but present way, and so in part I should have been more thoughtful about the fact that you were asking that question in relationship to how it might affect me. I’ll take that, and apologize if I was an ass about it. But about gender and genitals, I still have a few thoughts:

Those questions are complicated because it seems to suggest that further interrogation of trans bodies is appropriate, which is a difficult concept. A lot of my work is about saying, hey—here’s my gender. Deal with me on the face. If there’s some possibility that you might encounter my genitals, we’ll deal with that when we get there. And also, it’s about creating a space in the world for others to say the same. Asking a transperson about hir sex will always carry a whiff of, “But what are you, really?”

It is a lot like asking someone what name they were given at birth; it’s a way of trying to peel someone apart in a way that is intimate or invasive (based, largely, on the relationship between asker and askee). I do not use my first name anymore; no one calls me that except my parents and older relatives. When strangers ask, “What does the S. stand for?” I say, “My first name.” When people ask me about my genitals, I invite them to tell me about their own first. Being a display-model transmasculine person is a full-time job, but it does not pay well enough to offer all comers a look into my underpants, metaphorical or otherwise. It’s an intimacy, and I reserve the right to reveal it only to my intimates.

So—do genitals matter? Of course. The question for me then becomes—to whom, and why? I talk about my genitals with those people who I may reasonably imagine, through word or deed, have a legitimate interest (a group pretty well limited to my doctor, my therapist, and anyone with whom I have sex). The fact that my genitals are nonstandard for my gender matters to my mechanic or bank teller not at all—they are not interacting with them. Does someone learn more about me if I talk about my parts? Well, maybe. But why do they want to know? How many times in a day do I have to drop my pants for the educational good of others?

Am I defensive about this? Yes, certainly. As a transmasculine person, I experience a lot of poking and prodding at that emotional spot—what are you, really?—and it has become tender in response. So tender that sometimes really perfectly okay questions (like, “will your friend be babymaking with this new guy?”) feel like the same kind of accusation (Aha! Imposter!) that I more regularly experience.

That’s where the “gender crime” part comes in, the sense that I am somehow committing a fraud. Did you follow the Susan Stanton case in Florida? The manager of a small city down there announced her intention to transition from male to female and was fired. Why? Because despite fourteen years service and a sterling ...