No, You Don’t Understand.
This is the second in a series of essays commemorating Pride Month 2017. Here is the first, from last week, about a queer experience with straight media from my past. Relatively speaking, this one is from present. A third will follow next week.
Honestly, “They Beat the Girl Out of My Boy” is one of the weakest of The Vagina Monologues. Eve Ensler’s scripts shine most in their tonal whiplash, reflecting the emotional swerves of its audience as their complicated, deeply buried feelings about the titular subject matter unravel; or in their prosaic elegance, in the more poetic passages where sentence structure weakens into strings of beatific adjectives and evocative images. Neither of those manifest here. The monologue is uniform in its emotions, gruff in phrasing, monotonous in volume. The intimacy and the confrontational bodily fixations are mostly absent; the use of five performers — perhaps meant to portray the diversity of the transgender experiences it explores, or to show women in solidarity with some of their most vulnerable — overly fractures its characters and turns dialogue into chant. Performed by five cisgender white women (as it was that night, and every other time that I’ve seen it, and I suspect the majority of all the times it’s ever been played), it struggled to avoid coming off as tone-deaf, or at least to escape a surface understanding of the experiences beneath the words.
But it struck me all the same. What saves it is in the details, pulled directly from the interviews with trans women that give the piece substance. The knotty challenges of a my everyday existence were mirrored from the stage in tiny, blinding flashes. “I wondered why I was missing my bathing suit top at the beach.” “I went underground…it was good I was big.” “They didn’t want him falling in love with ambiguity. They were scared he’d get lost.”
I say “struck”, by the way, not in the sense of Proust contemplating his madeleine, but rather of Björk by Ricardo López, of Clara Immerwahr by her husband’s pistol in her own hand. Panic seized, compressed, blinded. I hunched over and closed my eyes, unable to watch anymore. My heart raced, my breathing became shallow, my breaths tiny, papery sobs. My fingernails, overlong and blemished by the final chipped flecks of last month’s paint job, dug so aggressively into my hand that they nearly drew blood.
I left before the show ended. On the pretext of folding my arms against the night air, my left hand found purchase on the skin of my right side. I gathered a fistful and held it fast all the way across campus, alternately ignoring and enjoying its signals of outrage. The pain felt grounding, comforting. It stood in well enough for discipline, or even punishment. Trans erasure is never more alive and well than it is within the trans person themself. I, furnished as I am with a penis and a bass voice and (despite my best efforts) nearly every shred of privilege that accompanies them, am not a “real woman,” my subconscious said, and therefore my identification with the experiences portrayed on that stage is invalid, an act of theft.
It’s not, of course. Nonbinary folks like me face much the same challenges as our fellow transpeople. We come out, we find ways to express ourselves, sometimes we transition. We face dysphoria, abandonment, discrimination, and violence. Bigots, pundits, and now those whom they helped install in the highest offices spew toxic nonsense about us. Our dearest friends slip up on our pronouns, and we feel the sting of knowing they still don’t recognize us as we are. And for me, assigned male at birth but unconsciously, then secretly, and now openly genderfluid, “They Beat the Girl Out of My Boy” handily (if broadly) articulates the search for, the pining after, the discovery of the feminine.
I don’t know that I want to have children, but my dysphoric experience includes a desire to give birth. To carry my share of Eve’s burden, to be torn open for the sake of another human. Enlser describes it elsewhere in the Monologues as an act of opera, that art whose generosity is so grand, so overwhelmingly consumptive of the mind and body that singers must regiment their diets, imprison their necks in mufflers, and drown their lungs with humidifiers just to continue giving: an eternity of prenatal caution in exchange for only a few hours of grueling extrusion at a time.
But I cannot extrude. As of writing, the technology does not yet exist to create a functioning uterus where there was none at birth, and if I see it in my lifetime it will likely be when I am too old to bear children regardless. Through transitioning, I may be entered, but I still cannot be exited. It is a loss, a deprivation, which I grieve often. But again (and for myself as much as for you), in this I am not deprived of my womanhood — only of my ability, my right, to exercise it.
Back in my dorm. Everything seems like it’s melting. I’ve stopped gripping myself, but now I just feel floating, unmoored, uncontrolled. I want to go out and buy a black dress. Some sushi. Tacos. Fuck, tacos sound really damn good right now. I have no money for any of these things, and my friends are out, or they’re not and I’m just too afraid to ask. Afraid they’ll say “no”. Afraid they’ll say “yes” and we’ll go out and I’ll do something stupid, or they’ll discover something new that they dislike about me, or they’ll be too busy pulling me out of this giddy cloud of anxiety and dissociation to have any fun. Like any good woman, I have acquiesced to patriarchy’s demand that I constantly apologize for myself. That I shrink myself to make space for others, as if the flourishing of human beings is zero-sum rather than comorbid, symbiotic.
I fear my own body. I see little reason not to, as it seems most people do. Shoppers in grocery stores shoot dirty looks at me, clutching their children to them as I pass. Well-meaning acquaintances and friends will often display an overzealous delight in my increasing feminization that betrays an unwillingness to normalize the nonbinary, a staid framing of my gender expression as “defection” across a clear line as opposed to statement of my selfhood. And the assignation of “trans” to my body, regardless of how that body looks or functions, chases away dating prospects in droves. It makes my sexuality forbidding and unknowable to them, or at least among the very first things that must be asked of me, the dealbreaker to end all dealbreakers. “I’m not transphobic, but I would never date a trans person” is a dissonance which I’ve heard countless times in as many words. “I don’t hate you, but I am justified in fearing you.”
When I am at my least charitable I tend to see this fear in cis women’s readings of “They Beat the Girl Out of My Boy.” They tend to shout it from the top of their lungs, as one might play a villain they could never find sympathy for, transmuting our justified anger into something wanton. For us, any speck of wantonness can constitute a complete character assassination, much as the slightest raising of her voice can cost a woman her career or any hint of anger can get a black man shot. Those who would delete us leap to envision us as shrill and menacing — our straining against the boundaries they draw for us as greedy and narcissistic — precisely because the public is all too ready to receive such a vision. You are ready to see us that way. In no small part, you already do. Even we — especially we — struggle to not see ourselves that way, struggle to resist gaslighting and cast off conditioning, even though we are so acutely aware of the pain such things caused us before we began fighting.
The next time that you knowingly encounter a trans person (and believe me, you encounter us far more often than you know), monitor the ways in which you consider their gender a burden to you. How much it bothers you that their clothes might not fit properly or their makeup might not be just so or their facial features might not look “right” — how you begrudge them for being “incorrect”. How, in the labor of adjusting your language to suit their pronouns, you come to see them as demanding. How their request of anything directly related to their being transgender — be it protection from harassment, donations for transition, understanding of their trauma — registers to you as a bid for undue attention and sympathy. But there are more effective and less drastic means of finding attention: observe how friends and family so often abandon us, while in the broadness of society our voices are so seldom allowed a platform. There are many more efficient and less dangerous means of garnering sympathy: research how often we are murdered or commit suicide, or the few studied projections anyone has bothered to cast of our life expectancy. If being transgender were a choice, who would choose it? What could we possibly gain from it that would be worth the cost of volunteering? A trans life is a beautiful life, a life worthy of your protection and respect, in no small part because it is not chosen. Because we must bear fear, hatred, and death — and the daily tumult all of these stir in our minds and spirits — for nothing more than coming into the world.
