But normal has always felt like a lie to me, a too-tight sweater we force ourselves to wear. "He is not like your father," she gasps, looking side to side.
How society has made the rules, issued the uniforms, the lists of approved activities, but where it counts, in your heart, in your head, the truth is always far blurrier. Girls play football, boys like to sew, everyone cries. How nothing is clear-cut, if you are honest about it. I struggle to breathe myself, trying to explain how gender and sexuality are not the same thing, how someone can feel himself to be a boy, even if he was not born with the boy kit. There are doilies on the tables, women with oxygen tanks wheezing nearby. This rapidly-becoming-familiar conversation is happening at an old-fashioned tearoom in Florida. "But Ali," my mother says, lowering her voice to a whisper, "you're not gay." And what about men with negligible penises? Are they only 10 percent male? How about men who require pills to make their penises elevate? Are they men only when medicated? If the only true definition of manliness is "one who possesses a working penis," that poses an interesting dilemma for the guy who's suffered, say, an unfortunate lamb shearing accident. This is still a man's world-men earn more, control more, are valued more-and what makes a man is nothing less than the key to the cultural castle. Transmen are used to these queries, invasive and inappropriate as they may be. Then there was my mother, who, upon hearing that my online beau and I were officially an item, blurted out, "Does it even work?" Some are astonishingly bold, like my good friend who requested I draw her a picture of what my boyfriend's privates looked like. Most of these questions are about sexual relations. When you date a man who was not born male, people have questions. The first incidence of what I would soon learn to be the defining question about my relationship with a transman: What the hell, if anything, is under the napkin?
"More like what's under the napkin," he says drily.Īnd there it was. "Plus," Ralph adds, looking pointedly down at his crotch, "there's this little issue." The last man I'd been involved with was 6'4", another ex-boxer, who'd grown up on the South Side of Chicago and so reeked of conventional masculinity that he'd been cast as cops and toughs in major motion pictures.