It Gets Better (4 page)

BELGRADE, ME

 

 

 

W
hen I was young there was a time when I figured, the hell with it. I'd never even said the word
transgender
out loud. I couldn't imagine saying it, ever. I mean, please.

So instead, one day a few years after I got out of college, I loaded all my things into the Volkswagen and started driving. I wasn't sure where I was going, but I knew I wanted to get away from the Maryland spring, with its cherry blossoms and its bursting tulips and all its bullshit. I figured I'd keep driving farther and farther north until there weren't any people. I wasn't sure what I was going to do then, but I was certain something would occur to me that would end this transgender business once and for all.

I set my sights on Nova Scotia. I drove to Maine and took a ferry out of Bar Harbor. I drove onto the SS
Bluenose
and stood on the deck and watched America drift away behind me, which as far as I was concerned was just fine.

There was someone walking around in a rabbit costume on the ship. He'd pose with you and they'd snap your picture and an hour or so later you could purchase the photo of yourself with the rabbit as a memento of your trip to Nova Scotia. I purchased mine. It showed a sad-looking boy
—I think that's a boy—
with long hair reading a book of poetry as a moth-eaten rabbit bends over him.

In Nova Scotia I drove the car east and north for a few days. When dusk came, I'd eat in a diner, and then I'd sleep either in the car or in a small tent that I had in the back. There were scattered patches of snow up there, even in May. I kept going north until I got to Cape Breton, which is about as far away as you can get from Baltimore and still be on dry land.

In Cape Breton I hiked around the cliffs, looked at the ocean. At night I lay in my sleeping bag by the sea as breezes shook the tent. I wrote in my journal, or read the poetry of Robert Frost, or grazed around in the Modern Library's
Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.
I read one up there called
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.

In the car I listened to the Warlocks sing “In the Early Morning Rain” on the tape deck. I thought about this girl I knew, Grace Finney. I thought about my parents. I thought about the clear, inescapable fact that I was female in spirit and how, in order to be whole, I would have to give up on every dream I'd had, save one.

I stayed in a motel one night that was officially closed for the season, but which the operator let me stay in for half price. I opened my suitcase and put on my bra and some jeans and a blue knit top. I combed my hair out and looked in the mirror and saw a perfectly normal-looking young woman.
This is so wrong?
I said to myself in the mirror.
This is the cause of all the trouble?

I thought about settling in one of the little villages around here, just starting life over as a woman. I'd tell everyone I was Canadian.

Then I lay on my back and sobbed. Nobody would ever believe I was Canadian.

The next morning I climbed a mountain at the far northern edge of Cape Breton Island. I climbed up to the top, trying to clear my head, but it wouldn't clear. I kept going up and up, past the tree line, past the shrub line, until at last there was just moss.

There I stood, looking out at the cold ocean, a thousand miles below me, totally cut off from the world.

A fierce wind blew in from the Atlantic. I leaned into it. I saw the waves crashing against the cliff below. I stood right at the edge. My heart pounded.

I leaned over the edge of the precipice, but the gale blowing into my body kept me from falling. When the wind died down, I'd start to fall, then it would blow me back up again. I played a little game with the wind, leaning a little farther over the edge each time.

Then I leaned off the edge of the cliff at a sharp angle, my arms held outward like wings, my body sustained only by the fierce wind, and I thought,
Well all right. Is this what you came here to do?

Then a huge blast of wind blew me backward and I landed on the moss. It was soft. I stared straight up at the blue sky, and I felt a presence.

Are you all right, son?
said the voice.
You're going to be all right. You're going to be all right.

Looking back now, I am still not sure whose voice that was. My guardian angel? The ghost of my father? I don't know. Does it really change things all that much, to give a name to the spirits that are watching out for us?

Still, from this vantage point—over twenty-five years later—my heart tells me that was the voice of my future self, the woman that I eventually became, a woman who, all these years later, looks more or less like the one I saw in the mirror in the motel. Looking back on the sad, desperate young man I was, I am trying to tell him something.
It will get better. It will not always hurt the way it hurts now. The thing that right now you feel is your greatest curse will someday, against all odds, turn out to be your greatest gift.

It's hard to be gay, or lesbian. To be trans can be even harder. There have been plenty of times when I've lost hope.

But in the years since I heard that voice—
Are you all right, son? You're going to be all right—
I've found, to my surprise, that most people have treated me with love. Some of the people I most expected to lose, when I came out as trans, turned out to be loving, and compassionate, and kind.

I can't tell you how to get here from there. You have to figure that out for yourself. But I do know that instead of going off that cliff, I walked back down the mountain that morning and instead began the long, long journey toward home.

CONCORD, MA

 

 

 

I
always wrote. Took my cue from
Harriet the Spy
in fifth grade and never looked back. But like many kids, I wasn't introspective. Didn't question my own identity. I came of age in a liberal time (early '70s), in a progressive Catholic environment (not always an oxymoron), among good people who were tolerant of many things as long as they went unnamed. So I remained basically clueless about myself.

For a while, in high school, a cadre of friends caught my writing habit. We scribbled approximations of our real feelings in the safety and pretend anonymity of our journals. Then we circulated these notebooks for peer review, scrawling appreciative comments or jokes in the margins. A way of sharing private apprehensions and affections in a safe environment. A pre-electronic community blog, you could call it. Nixon-era Facebook.

I'd always gone about my own business, a cheery isolate of sorts, enjoying female friends who were never, somehow, girlfriends. I'd never been part of a sports team or a male mob. Junior year, this seemed to change; I started hanging out with three musicians, teenage guys. One February afternoon, after a basement jam session, we took some hot chocolate into the parlor. One of the boys—one I later realized I'd had a crush on—closed the doors. They cleared their throats and the spokesfellow said, as kindly as possible, “We've been thinking about it, and we've decided that guys writing in journals is a faggy thing to do. We're going to stop and we think you should too.”

What happened next? I suspect I left the house with a polite excuse, masking my shame and the pain of rejection. Except for pausing to rinse out my mug, I didn't hesitate, though. If to be a writer meant to be a loner, I would be a loner. I cried all the way home.

Years later, I would hear Elphaba sing on Broadway, “Something has changed within me. Something is not the same. I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game.” Sing it, sister. Now, I realize I committed myself to becoming a writer that awful afternoon.

Of course, it wasn't just a writer I was choosing to be. I was choosing to be myself.

NEW YORK, NY

 

 

 

D
espite the title of this book, there is nothing inevitable about change for the better. The only reason big changes happen is when people like you and me decide to fight for things to change, when we take action to make things different.

Gandhi organized for decades in India to get rid of the British. In 1947 (only sixty-four years ago!), the movement he created overthrew one of the biggest colonial empires using nonviolent resistance.

Your grandmothers and great-grandmothers could not vote in the United States—it only changed in 1921 (ninety years ago!).

Black people did not have full voting rights in this country until 1965 (forty-six years ago!).

And lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people did not have the right to have sexual relationships without violating criminal laws until 2003 (only eight years ago!). Or think about India: The LGBT movement just got a court to overturn the laws criminalizing same-sex/samegender behavior in 2009 (two years ago!).

All of these changes—for women, for African Americans, for LGBT folks—took a massive social movement to make happen.

This is my story of how it's gotten better for me. I'm Indian American, born there, and grew up here since I was eight. Like all Asian kids, my family's expectations—their dreams for me, their demands on me—weighed heavily on me, and never heavier than when I realized I was a lesbian.

But you know what? Activism saved my life. I got involved with a feminist group (of men and women working to really transform gender roles and patriarchy into a more just system). I got involved with a movement trying to end the racist Apartheid system in South Africa (you guys, it only ended in 1994!). I got involved with queer activism, with lefty groups, with all the rabble-rousers and radicals working to end the AIDS epidemic, to create a fairer economy, to win rights for immigrants, to end wars, and make the world more fun and sexy!

What I found in social movements was a whole life that has given me hope, inspiration, friendships, and my lover, Kate (of twenty-three years), whom I met at a queer conference. Social activism is all about optimism, even when you lose. The process of doing something about it all generates lots of adrenaline and serotonin that just make you feel better, like a sweaty dance to music you love.

But truthfully, social change is not always fun—just like life. There's a lot of wacky people, nut-bucket opponents, and powerful forces that want to maintain things just the way they are—so defeat, occasional despair, loss, and discomfort are all part of the process of social action.

What keeps me going, though, is a combination of stubbornness (I'll be damned if they are going to knock me around and get away with it), cold-blooded anger (don't get mad, get even), faith (social-justice activism is an act of belief in the possibility of something you do not know will ever happen), and pleasure (in the people I have met along the way, the incredible change I have been a small part of making, and the massive amounts of fun I have had along the way).

The great news is that there is a global queer movement today. And it is full of young and old people fighting to make space for us to live and love and breathe and be who we are and create the lives we imagine. You can join it; in fact you can lead it. It's all being made right before your eyes.

So make it better—get active.

WEST BEND, WI

 

 

 

H
igh school sucks.

It's even worse if you're lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. There's the whole getting comfortable with your sexuality thing. There's the straight-girl crushes. Oh, the frustration of the straight-girl crushes! There's the school administration that can sometimes make you feel like they don't really care about you. They can seem purposefully obtuse, like they're out to make your life miserable. Sometimes your administration
is
homophobic and
is
purposefully making things hard for you, even though they're the people who are supposed to be there to help you. And then there are the other students. They're just so . . .