Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (15 page)

Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows a transsexual. Or is related to one. Remember that notion that only six degrees separate any two people on the planet? Well, you can halve the number between any normal person and a transsexual.

That autumn and winter at work, I was asked constantly about Dana Stevens. Vermont is an extremely small state, and the university and public radio communities are particularly close. And so people around me seemed to know quickly that my ex-wife was dating a transsexual, and then living with one.

"What do you think?" they'd ask, and--my voice indifferent--I'd tell them it was her life.

"Look at this," my assistant, Rita, said about three weeks before Christmas, and she showed me a holiday card the station had received the day before from a graphic design firm in Montreal that we used periodically. They'd created their card in the shape of an apple, and included inside a photograph of the staff that had been taken at an orchard. There must have been fifteen employees in the picture, and it was clear that the shot had been posed in the picking season in early autumn: Everyone was wearing a heavy sweater and a comfortable jacket--everyone except the thirty-something redhead in a sleeveless sundress. The redhead who stood a head taller than everyone else in the photo. The redhead with the creamy white skin on shoulders as broad as mine.

No. Broader.

"Transsexual?" I asked Rita.

"Yup."

And Kate Michaels, perhaps our foremost expert on classical music, kept finding me CDs in our collection by transsexual and drag performers. Every other day she must have discovered another one. Rarely--never, actually--did she find an artist we played on the air, but they were still talented musicians on reputable labels. I saw the word
diva
on the CD title a little too often for my taste, and to this day I don't understand why so many of them insisted on wearing feather boas, but there was usually nothing inherently wrong with their music.

Any number of times I almost asked Kate to stop, or told her that the joke had gone far enough. Once I nearly suggested that her interest in this subject was unnatural, but I wasn't sure if the remark would come out as light as I meant it.

After all, a day didn't go by that month when I wouldn't pick up two or three of the CDs in the stack on the credenza I never used--the credenza on which I would toss the CDs after Kate had shared them with me--and stare at the people on the covers. I'd stare at their trans-gender lips or their transsexual mouths, I'd look closely at the shape of their cheeks and their noses and their jaws. I'd try and see beyond their smiles and their pouts--beyond the oddly flirtatious gaze in their eyes--to figure out whether they were indeed happy.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

All Things Considered

Tuesday, September 25

DR. JEN FULLER:
In my opinion, clothing is infinitely more important to a transsexual than to a transvestite. A transvestite is merely using clothing to play a role. A transsexual is using it to define himself--or herself--as a human being.

Chapter 13.

allison

I RATHER DOUBT I'D HAVE SEEN DANA AGAIN IF I'd thought seriously about the consequences. I know I didn't have any expectations or goals when I called him two days after he told me his plans; I don't think I had thought as far as tomorrow.

Maybe I thought I would see him once more and hurt him. Maybe I thought I could talk him out of it. Maybe I just never stopped loving him. I don't know.

But I certainly hadn't expected the two of us would be living together as the snow would start falling in earnest in early December, or that on the very first Monday of the month I'd be called into the principal's office after school.

"You must hate this sort of thing," Glenn said, using his metal wastepaper basket like an ottoman for his big heavy loafers.

"What sort of thing?" I asked. I figured I'd play naive, though I knew exactly why I was there. Glenn Frazier had only come to the school that September, and in little more than a season had shown himself to be an administrative automaton and a middle-aged martinet. We'd already had a series of run-ins that fall. We'd bickered the very first week of school when a mother complained that I was giving my sixth-graders too much free rein when we visited the World Wide Web on the classroom computer, and then we'd quarreled during the second week over my decision to allow some of the students to go swimming out at the maritime museum when the bus wouldn't start. Two parents had called him, and he wasn't simply concerned that I had endangered my students' welfare: A rumor had spread that I had actually allowed the girls to go swimming topless. Two weeks after that, Glenn prohibited me from taking my class on a picnic near the cliffs behind Will's house. I'd gone there with eighteen to twenty eleven-year-olds every single year for almost a decade and a half, and the only accident I'd ever witnessed had been an adult chaperone's twisted ankle. Still, Glenn was convinced that it was only a matter of time before one of the kids ventured to the ledge and did a cannonball over the side.

He shrugged. "Talking about your life. You must hate it. After all, it is
your
life. I know how hard it is to live in a fishbowl."

"I live in a Victorian village house."

He rolled his eyes and smiled. "You know what I mean."

"Honestly, I don't."

He pulled his feet back from the trash can and sat up straight in his desk chair. His office overlooked the playground, and I saw that it had started to snow once again, and the snow was beginning to stick to the seats on the swings and the metal bars of the jungle gym.

"Your new live-in," he said.

I nodded. "Ah."

"I had a parent call me about him today. That makes three in a week--actually, three since last Thursday--so I figured we should connect."

"A parent of one of my students?"

"Yup."

"May I ask who?"

"Well, today it was Lindsey's dad. Lindsey Lessard."

"I don't know him."

"Richard Lessard?"

"Nope. We've never met. I know Lindsey's mom."

"Well, he's concerned."

"Why?"

"Why do you think? Because his daughter's sixth-grade teacher is living with a transvestite."

"Not true."

He rolled his chair closer to his desk and folded his hands on the blotter. "We've all seen him."

"Dana's not a transvestite."

"We're about to play a game of semantics, aren't we?"

"No. But Dana's a transsexual. There's a big difference."

"Point noted. Bottom line? He's still a guy in a dress. He's still wandering around Grand Union in lipstick and mascara."

"I don't see why Richard Lessard should care."

"I don't think he would if Dana didn't take his groceries and go back to your house."

"What does he want?"

"Richard? I'm not sure. But he's not happy. Mostly he just wanted to vent--like the others."

"And you were happy to listen."

"It's my job."

"Did you defend me?" The question seemed to catch him off guard, and for a long moment he stared at the row of Thanksgiving pictures the first-graders had drawn the month before.

"I said you've been here a long time. And most of the time you seem to have pretty good judgment."

"Most of the time?"

"I was honest. We've really only known each other since August."

"Well. Thank you for the ringing testimonial."

"You know you have my support."

"Hardly!"

"You do. But I am concerned about this relationship of yours."

"I have many relationships. Do you mean the one with my daughter? My ex-husband? My friend Molly?"

"That attitude doesn't make this any easier."

"Who lives with me is none of Richard Lessard's business."

"That's not true. You teach his daughter. He pays your salary."

"It's not like I'm shacked up with a convicted child abuser. It's not like I'm having some fifteen-year-old's baby."

"No. You're living with a man in a dress."

I could see this conversation was going nowhere good, and that remaining and arguing with him would only make things more difficult. And so I asked him what he wanted me to do.

He was quiet for a long moment, and then he shook his head. "At this point," he said finally, "I just wanted you to know that parents were calling me. That's it." And then he scrunched up his eyebrows and tried to look thoughtful. "I guess that's really all," he said, and then added, "at least at this point."

That December, Dana and I went to Montreal for the weekend with Molly Cochran and her husband, a lawyer named Clayton. We went to the theater on Saturday night, and we spent the weekend afternoons shopping for Christmas presents and clothes at the elegant department stores along Saint Catherine.

On Saturday afternoon, the four of us wandered from Eaton's to Frommer and Bristol. Clayton was in the men's department on the first floor browsing through neckties, while Molly, Dana, and I were upstairs trying on business suits and skirts. The dressing room in that section is a rarity, especially for a store as refined as F&B's: Although the individual changing rooms are private, separated from one another by long, cabana-like doors, the three-sided mirrors are in a large chamber between the changing rooms and the store floor. The result? You have to emerge into a vaguely communal anteroom to see whether the dress you're thinking about is indeed flattering.

At one point, Dana and Molly had disappeared into the dressing room, while I was looking at pleated skirts along a side wall.

When they returned, Molly was giggling and Dana was oddly self-satisfied. Almost smug.

Molly squeezed my wrist and said, "You really are a dyke." Then she kissed my cheek.

I assumed I knew exactly what had occurred and was unimpressed. "What did you think Dana would do in there? Try and find a urinal? Hide in a changing room?"

"You had to be there, Allison. This had nothing to do with peeing like a woman or simply trying to act female."

"Much more affirming," Dana added, and he pointed discreetly toward a man and a woman chatting beside a rack of blazers. As I looked more closely at the pair, I realized that the woman was actually a man in drag.

"Was he in there when you two were?" I asked, referring to the transvestite.

Molly nodded and then told us what she had witnessed. Apparently, Dana had been standing at one of the three-sided mirrors beside a woman, fixing his headband and adjusting the shoulders of the dress he was considering. The transvestite had emerged from a changing room, seen the two females before the mirrors, and abruptly grown anxious and fled back onto the store floor. The woman at the mirror beside Dana had shaken her head, clearly appalled.

"Isn't it just amazing? That guy was trying to look like a girl," she had said to Dana. "What kind of man thinks he can do that?"

When Molly had finished her story, Dana offered a small smile and murmured contentedly, "And that, dear hearts, is the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual."

Sometimes, in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I felt a bit like Beauty in the story of Beauty and the Beast. Like many little girls, Carly had loved the tale as a child, and so I knew the basics of the plot pretty well.

I don't mean to suggest that I was as lovely as Beauty, or that Dana, by comparison, was as frightening as the Beast. Not at all. But I had begun to see my home as a castle, and the only spot in the world where I could feel absolutely safe. Moreover, because Dana was focused almost entirely on staying healthy for his upcoming surgery, he spent huge chunks of his day doing nothing more than taking care of the house and preparing the magnificent breakfasts and dinners we shared. And so, just as it was for Beauty once she was inside the Beast's walls, there was absolutely no work for me to do. None. Everything, suddenly, was provided for me, and I was cared for and loved with a fervor I'd never before felt in my life.

Nevertheless, while Dana may not have looked like a Beast, I did understand that he was viewed as one whenever he ventured beyond the front door of our little citadel. While he could pass as a woman among strangers, everyone in town knew exactly who he was, and all too often he was seen as a freak--a freak who was insane.