Brent, I called him. He was tall, lanky, leanly muscled, skin the brown of a burned gingersnap, hair trimmed, jaw square, yet soft. The day he came up to me, I knew almost nothing of him—except one big, incandescent rumor—but he, clearly, knew all about me. How, I never knew. It was as if he had just seen me and figured it out, just like that, clear as a clownfish above the kelp on a clear day of snorkeling.
He stopped me one purple evening as I was walking out of Dominica’s State College, a sad campus of derelict buildings up a hill flanked by elephant grass, sugarcane, and trees, not far above a penal institution that existed in our minds almost as a place of legendary brutality; we imagined, often, what the prisoners might do to us if they escaped, as if it were Alcatraz, or Azkabhan. At night, the campus was flooded with used condoms and litter; during the day, the teachers showed up when they wished. It was not accredited, though supervisors at the school sometimes said it was or spoke extraordinary, meandering sentences around the topic to attempt to make you forget what you had even asked. Fights broke out once in a while, but, unlike secondary school, there weren’t often teachers willing—if present at all—to stop them, like a remarkable bout I saw outside one afternoon where one boy picked up a wooden chair and hit another boy with it while people cheered with the fervor of wrestling fans. It was a shit school, basically, and I lasted part of a semester before dropping out to try to get into a college overseas, like some of my friends. But I felt OK there, too, if only because I imagined I was largely invisible except to my friends, a shy, awkward child who avoided most conflict.
“Hey,” Brent said that evening.
I had never spoken to him before in person. I knew him primarily for the rumor that he was gay—even as he always had a girl on his arm in his social-media photographs, then and for years to come. He might have been bi, or using the women as shields. All I knew was that I was suddenly terrified. If people saw him talking to me, they might suspect that I, too, was queer. And that, I knew, would not end well, not in this world where you could be dragged into the canes on the side of the road and raped with a broomstick or broken bottles, after being beaten senseless, so that you would, somehow, turn straight.
Mainly, I was scared that he knew what I daydreamed and night-dreamed, the endless visions of myself as a woman, with another woman, in love; less commonly, I was with a man as I sailed on the dinghy of these forbidden thoughts. I have always been more attracted to femininity, both in myself and in prospective partners; masculinity has always repelled me. Yet for that reason, too, it intrigued me, if only because I knew so little, then, about what it would be like to be with a man. Either way, I knew something was different about me. I was a little trans pansexual deep in a cramped closet. I didn’t as yet know what it meant to be transgender—I still was at that torturous and tortuous phase of believing I would burn in hell for eternity for having the thoughts I did—but I knew I wanted a queer relationship, no matter how it was framed, for I wanted to be seen, not as a man, but as a woman, and, ideally, I wanted another girl, or maybe a boy, to love me back. I wondered if Brent could see this, sense this somehow. It didn’t help that my first ex-girlfriend, a terrible person named Tara, had decided to punish me after we broke up by making a fake social-media account for me that showed feminine photos of me playing with my long, black curls and posing with what I now embarrassingly know is a duckface. I still don’t know how she got them, as I took them in private. The page claimed, in my lurid fake bio, that I was gay and loved Hannah Montana. When I tell this story now, I burst out laughing—it seems like something out of a high-school movie, Tara a quintessential Mean Girl—but at the time, I was mortified and had my cousin, whom I viewed as certifiably cool, do damage control, telling everyone in my circle of acquaintances the account was “obviously” fake. What Tara hadn’t known, of course, was how close to the truth she had gotten.
“I know what you are,” he said, after I mumbled a bit.
Shit.
I like girls, I told him—not untrue, but also not the whole story.
He shook his head and smiled. “OK,” he said. It was obvious he didn’t believe me.
I repeated myself. He told me, essentially, I was in denial. (I was.) He wanted to message me online; could he? I freaked out. I repeated, like a maniac, that I was only into girls.
By this point, I was convinced the whole school was watching me, ears attuned to our conversation with preternatural hearing. I fled like a scared idiot and left him there. I never spoke to him in person again.
• •
I think of Brent sometimes still, a sea away in the labyrinthine city of New York. I wonder how he knew, with such conviction. Of course, I don’t think he realized I was trans, per se, rather than simply queer, but I think he still saw something in me. Maybe it was all a coincidence; I never like the simplistic idea that you can assume someone’s orientation simply by looking at them. Still, the moment stuck with me, quiet-bright as a firefly.
Something similar happened with an uncle of mine, who, to my horror, told me one night at a holiday party that I was real sexy and that he wanted me. He had implied something similar, years before, but I hadn’t understood then; I didn’t want to understand. As with Brent, I fled, keeping away from him during the rest of the party, until he collapsed from his own intoxication. I wondered if he, too, could see the girl inside me, lamplit inside some room only certain eyes could peer into. Like Brent, I never spoke to that uncle again, though, with my uncle, it was worse; I had loved and trusted him, and after that, he became something that cast a scary shadow: someone who I no longer know if I can face. I wondered, often, why they were drawn to me.
I think of that a lot nowadays, the idea that someone can simply see, just like that, that you may be queer. I think of it, walking through the world as a trans woman, wondering if others will know. I think of that when I consider how the president has decided, unceremoniously, that people like me are unfit to enter the military. How his administration tries to legislate even the word transgender—and, thus, our legal being—out of existence. I think of it every time I enter the restroom. I think of it when I remember the time a man kept doing something to my body, even as I said no, and I was afraid to yell because I did not know if his roommate knew I was trans, and I was afraid of what might happen if I shrieked and he came upstairs and saw me naked and decided, in a horrified rage, that something worse should happen to my body.
I think of it every time I walk into an airport, knowing I must undergo a little ritual before I can go through the TSA’s body-scanner or it will flag what is in my underwear as an “anomaly.” I go into a restroom every time I’ve checked in, before I enter the line for security check. In a stall, I make sure my body is arranged a certain way—the testicles I never wanted to have pushed up into the inguinal canals, my other body part tucked neatly between my legs, held in that position by a tight panty. It doesn’t hurt, usually, and I don’t need to do this most of the time. But when I approach the TSA’s body scanner, the attendant will press a button corresponding to the sex they believe me to be—female—and any unexpected body configuration will trigger an “anomaly.” When I do this correctly, the machine doesn’t pick up anything; if anything, my mass of curly hair is more likely to confuse the machine. But sometimes, it does trigger the machine, and then a woman pats me down, and I hope, hope no one will make me explain what I am, make me undress in a room for security threats, hope they will not humiliate me in front of everyone. I am thankful, each time I escape the machine, that I have not been humiliated for my body.
I think of it every time I hear the president make a special effort to roll back our protections. I already feel visible, with light-brown skin, curly hair, and being trans; his hateful policies make me feel even more watched, more followed, more shadowed, more paranoid about my safety.
I think about it, too, when I kiss my partner in public, and decide, for the moment, to stop worrying, and just be, not hidden under lamplight, but in full starbloom.
I think about it, until I no longer know what to do. I reread James Baldwin obsessively, his volcanic essays in The Cross of Redemption, most of all; he helps orient my whirling compass. His words are fire, yet inwardly adjuvant, helping me see in the vespertine hours that seem, more and more, like all of my days. He hurts me; he soothes me; he helps me understand why, sometimes, I feel I will simply snap in rage when someone says the wrong thing because I have dealt, for so long, with people saying the wrong things and having those wrong things enshrined by conservatives into law, while white, cisgender liberals grin at me and pat their backs because they imagine they have done enough simply by attending a panel discussion or a class of mine, thinking yes, I am a good liberal, a good person, because I let myself sit in the same room as someone so freakishly dissimilar as she, is she a her at all, well, anyway, I let myself sit in the same room as she, and so I must be a good person. I want, as Baldwin did, more: want these people to fight for my rights, as I will fight for theirs. I want to cease remembering that I am not a citizen in a country where I am, in fact, legally a citizen, for if I were a citizen, as Malcolm X observed in a debate moderated by Baldwin, I would not be fighting for my civil rights, for I would already have said rights. The true perdition of this land is not in the hells that burn, the Trump-trumpeting evangelists tell us, at its borders: it is in the hellscape in the mortal here and now, such that I must feel fear each time I enter certain spaces, so that this mortal coil—and it is coiled, like a snake, for Eden is a world signifying lifelessness rather than life—feels dense with hatred for people, invading things, like me. The evangelists of this xenophobic tract wish to bring hell to this world, at least for people like me, a barbarian at the gates of decency; they spurn hellfire, except when they can use it to dangle us over the flames with the ecstasy of Jonathan Edwards’s angry god.
I remember all this, and the weight is like the deceptive heaviness of twilight.
I write, trying to light a flame through language.
The personal is political, and vice versa, and all politics is about identity; there is no “identity” politics, for that is all politics, and to think otherwise is to acknowledge the bubble of privilege one lives in.
I write, seeking an art that will last as the shadows lengthen, one that braids the lyric to the political without sounding like a jeremiad from the sidewalk or a piece of propaganda that will live only for a moment. I seek a political, nuanced, understanding, beautiful, blood-incarnadined art that brings all of us, no matter our differences, to life.
I write, and fail, and try again.
Then I pause, and the paranoia comes back. I think of how the country I once imagined as a refuge from the one I fled has now come to seem so threatening, its shadows so barbed, its walls—real or imagined—forbiddingly tall.
I want to feel like a citizen in a country, even as it sees people like me—trans, queer, brown—in so many of its nightmares.
• •
Recent shows and comics: Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam, Captain Marvel, GLOW, One Day at a Time, Dirk Gently (escapism), etc.
