Transgender Thoughts
aka
anti-static thought patterns (on enforced thinking)
Marie Kazalia
Dawn--D-A-W-N not Don D-O-N --tho that used to be her name. Guessed that, even before she’d shown me the first book published on Rock stars-- interviews with Janis Joplin and what’s-his name from the Doors-- there was her old name Donald, listed as a interviewer for that book project. She’d made money from it in the 60’s in New York, where she was he and used to walk home a lot with her neighbor Nico, from a fringe membership in the Warhol Factory crowd--but Dawn and I had become friends based on other things. Why was she trying to snowball me into accepting her-- when I already had, I’d assumed, because I like her, talking to her --her intelligence, insights-- yeah, love some of those old rock songs and Janis, but I’ve never been a rock groupie. Dawn had had some interesting experiences. That’s all I thought of them. And I didn’t behave as she expected.
Other people I’d mentioned her to, certain guy friends, wanted to jump right on interviewing Dawn, only because of who she’d known, and I thought, well, maybe Dawn and I could write something together-- collaborate and sell an article or something like that. We discussed a collaboration-- she’d been thinking of it too-- but then later she started saying things like those other guys, like a pre-programmed behavior, suspicious of my motives. I told her outright we’d work on it together and split what ever came from it--if anything. Always for me, talking thru that kind of ignorant naivety a tiresome bore --want out of that mind-set, not going to let it worm it’s way into me. So I lost interest in the project--too hard dealing with someone who thinks that way, would rather not get involved, let it into my inner life --not fun-- profit not my motive--she can write it herself, alone, with someone else, I shrugged. Shit--the more I came to know her the more old-fashioned I realized her ways of thinking--assumptions.
Still we had fun together talking, hanging out in a local cafe drinking coffee --what bothered me most tho, when we walked out the door together, she always let me go first, like a man would.
And when a certain woman we both know said to me that it was nice of me to go around with Dawn, laughing, knew what she referred to and just ignored her words, that way of thinking.
Soon after, sitting drinking coffee together, Dawn asked if she could ask me a question. Then she wanted to know if she and I would ever have sex together. My thoughts on-- how do you have sex with someone who had once been a man, and had his sex organs removed in Bangkok? She had told me the story of how she’d awoken from the sex change surgery and the doctor told her he’d thrown in the free removal of her Adam’s Apple too. I like a bizarre story, but for practicality sake and in the here and now, I could not devise any associated emotions--any desires to the sex act I suddenly narrowed it down to, with her. Didn’t think she was open enough to tell me physical methods-- besides I’d heard about them before. So just then, as a kind way of brushing her off I replied truthfully to her question, that I didn’t know if we’d have sex or not, and she sounded surprised and pleased that at least I hadn’t said no, there might be a possibility. The thought then I had for a long time, of taking her hand, saying, well, you know we can touch and be affectionate and hug one another if nothing else, but something stopped my hand from moving, my mouth from speaking my thoughts. Not afraid I told myself-- just into other things from different worlds. Later, making the excuse that Dawn’s so conservative, my reason for holding back, when I might show affection at least-- more freely and with less fore-thought. As I found myself doing with others I liked even less than her.
Sometime later, Dawn and I went to a huge party in a warehouse studio with a live jazz band playing when we walked in, that changed to DJ’s and choreographed dance performances by dancers in body-art costumes. Films projected onto installations of on layered fabric panels hanging from the high ceiling, a light show flashing all around. Dawn said this reminded her of the Factory-- this was a present day version of what the Factory had been about. We had some drinks, and Dawn said she was looking for a lover, she hadn’t had one in a long time. She pointed out various people as possibilities and asked me what I thought of each-- yet she never left my side all night at the party. I thought of her doing this as either a bizarre honesty or a very male ploy. As I recall it now, I attributed my lack of interest in her to our age difference-- I usually like younger men, for some reason that’s been my pattern. Then other things about Dawn, like her methodical paleontology research--her long days and nights looking at tiny fossils thru a microscope, writing scientific research papers. Her trips to give her papers at conferences in Germany and Peru--really dull in practice under the initial interest, curiosity. But she also made sculpture, she referred to as statues, and so I thought her old fashioned again. Her love for Camille Claudel, pretending she’d been Camille and all the usual flaming queen kind of stuff.
Dawn considered herself a lesbian at times, a transgender at other times-- had established those categories. I wanted my own ways, as much freedom as possible outside pre-defined roles.
Well weeks later--one day in a hot tub at a women-only bathhouse with my friend Teresa, both of us in the large tile-lined hot tub-- movement of someone coming into the room caught my attention. The back of a naked man’s body, long hippy kind of hair like Dawn’s, tall, broad shoulders, had a man’s ass definitely--when in doubt other men tell by looking at the ass, some say the legs, some say the hands, the Adam’s apple--Dawn had her Adams’ apple surgically removed. This naked man had man’s legs, my instant thought *why is a man in here invading our women-only place of privacy* and then I figured he must be a sex-change. He turned, had tiny hormone-puffed breasts and a bush of hair left where his penis had been removed. His voice low manly-low as he spoke, trying to demurely slide into the hot tub beside me. I made some excuse to turn away, checking the handles that controlled the hot water bubble streams, and he trying hard to speak in the flow pattern of a woman, said *oh, how do you control the bubbles?*
I found it difficult to turn and speak with him as I normally would, when speaking to just most people. I couldn’t take my thoughts from the violence he’d done to himself-- that horrible surgery. Trying to become some static definition of what a woman is, there amid naked butch dyke lesbians still more womanly naturally than his attempts to be a woman. Still I could not fake any sort of acceptance, with this one-- with Dawn at least she always had her clothes on, and we had real stuff to talk about. Smalltalk faked left my own disguised open-minded-ness naked. With my naked body in the hot tub next to the transgender’s I realized it was the so-called sex change operation that bothered me, that I had been avoiding deciding what it was. Why Dawn or this guy in the water could not accept themselves as they’d been born. Why couldn’t they be some sort of lesbian, only with real cocks, and do whatever they wanted with what they had-- wear all sorts of clothes male and female. Whatever happened to the concept of uni-sex clothing? Why did transgenders feel compelled to use clothing and sexual preferences to define all of themselves, totally, instead of keeping things in control-- allowing aspects of who they are, in whatever variation. Working with what they had. Their obviously bad attempts to apply some assumed conformity--this guy in the hot tub looked just like a man in every way. Their own non-acceptance of themselves caused them to do something so horrible to their own intimate bodies as cut off their penis and testicles. That made me feel scarred--pained inside my chest. Really, so very little about both Dawn and this one in the water had stopped being male, attitude, behaviors.
Seemed to me they were hiding out from the world-- no longer male they could criticism macho behavior/thinking, yet keep some of it as they wished, as it suited them. Technically enter a bathhouse as a woman, adopting this other category, all used as means of escaping. Couldn’t they see that!? When in the company of lesbians, seeking acceptance/admittance or lovers, Dawn referred to herself as lesbian. When with so-called and obviously straight people Dawn admitted to transgender and watched everyone’s eyes pop out as they made excuses to scurry away. When Dawn demanded acceptance and her rights, in public, in her profession, who around her even had any pre-programmed behavior expectations to apply to her!-- of what a transgender was supposed to act like?!-- So she cleverly side-stepped all sexual roles and expectations. Yet, still-- in spite of feeling all my life that I want to try and understand all sorts of people, my thoughts of Dawn and the man in the water were painful, and did not inspire an urge in me to touch...
