Notes From the Interface:
“The Color of Sunlight.”
It’s been quite a while since I posted anything “new” on Medium. I set quote marks around that adjective partly because this isn’t particularly “new” — insofar as transgender issues are concerned — nor is it something unique to any Boomer who’s stared at their reflected image in the morning and wondered just what the hell happened to that person they once were.
She’s still in here, to be sure, just not as voluble as she once was.
Nor is it particularly “new” for me as a late transitioner, a “senior” citizen who took her own sweet goddamned time making up her mind about this gender thing. It took a divorce, a bankruptcy, the death of my father — and two of my best friends as well as both of my dogs — unemployment and extreme poverty to cattle-prod me into making a decision I should have made nearly three decades previous. I belatedly realized that if I didn’t do this, now, with as much fortitude as I could muster, I’d never get another chance.
I may be slow but punch me in the head often enough and I will catch on, promise, cross my heart.
The decision also prompted me to reflect, not for the first time, how in the world I could be safe and still do this transgender thing; transition from male to female and just have done with all of the heartbreak and mental torment I’d come to realize was not only making me foul-tempered and miserable, but was also pushing me closer and closer to the edge of suicide.
I went back to school.
You laugh, perhaps? Or do you nod in agreement? Both of you are wrong, just as I was wrong to think that it would be a cure-all, a panacea, armor against this insanely hostile world. Like all things, it was a mixed bag, a safe space for me, not so much a safe space for others near me . . .
I seem to have a tendency to confound a lot of people, perhaps because I don’t fit anyone’s understanding of what a transgender woman should be.
Not even mine.
Too long in a body soaked with testosterone; I’m too butch: too tall, too big, too masculine to “pass” as a woman. Too effeminate, too gentle, too unassuming — but perhaps still too aggressive in all the wrong ways — too self-consciously female to ever be considered as “just one of the guys.”
Not that I ever was, but I’ve discovered that knowing all about cars, DIY home repairs, and other “guy” things did not endear me to any male who was quite willing to suspend his disbelief long enough to think that Megan Fox — in a pair of cut-offs way high and a tank top way low — actually knows what she’s doing, poking around under the hood of a high performance sports car.
Perhaps it’s her eyeliner.
A liberal arts college education seemed like the best possible solution, a livable “interface” between the two poles of the Binary, a place where my masculinity and femininity need not clash and in fact might actually support each other. I’d lived in the “enemy camp,” therefore I could reflect upon and report back on the conditions in the boy’s locker room, the athletic field, under the hood of a car, even on the stage as a “quasi-rock god” who looked good under colored lights, despite (or perhaps because of) eyeliner, platform heels and curly blonde hair down to the middle of my back. (Been there, done that, even got the tee shirt — a lot of tee shirts — in those bands. They’re in a box somewhere.)
I’d been living in the “interface” for so long, it seemed only natural to start learning about it, even writing about it.
I thought at first I might be a staff writer for a talking head, a TV journalist’s office, writing reports and news stories that would further explain this world and its steaming, tangled web of human interest narratives. Somewhere along the way, I shifted to a creative writing major because I’d always been a story-teller intent on tales of the people, not the city, not the furniture, the menu, or the gadgets, but simply the people, the “human interest” angle so near and dear to a feature editor’s heart and allegedly the common man.
The greatest human interest story I’d ever seen, ever heard of, somehow came across my radar screen and changed my life forever.
I’m still trying to decide if it was for the good or something much worse.
You tell me. Here’s the “pitch,” as they say in the writing Biz — which includes Hollywood as you will soon see:
A naïve Home Health nurse in Montana is assigned to a blind, terminally-ill transgender woman and both learn the full measure of unconditional acceptance and love, as well as the greatness and limitations of the human heart.
Does it sound intriguing? Would you read a book about this experience? Would you watch a limited television series about it?
It’s a true story, you see, not imaginary at all, and for the nurse and myself, it now appears as someone else’s life, from an entirely different world, a fairy-tale even, something deliberately designed solely as a lesson in Ethos and Pathos, with a solid punch of Logos to underscore, even armor the narrative with incontrovertible facts.
These are the elements of Classical Rhetoric, techniques every living thing on this planet uses, especially humans, even if it’s only to convince others that we exist and must therefore be considered. I didn’t learn about these things until my third or fourth year of college. I rejected them at first, came at last to accept them, even embrace them as the only means possible for any dialogue.
The nurse contracted with me to write — or at least edit — the book, so I did. The result was a tale that almost won a Lambda Literary award in 2011 and caused a bit of a stir in the trans tribes. It did win a somewhat lesser award, one with almost no name recognition but that’s success ‘n fame for ya. We didn’t make much money either. It’s all relative.
Some saw it as an opportunity to tell their own stories and it’s a pity that so many of them approached us in the hope that we would do it for them, pro bono, because isn’t everyone’s life a movie? Are we not all stars in our own productions? Limited, of course, only by budget and the usual parameters defined by the aphorism: “Every life is an edited one, colored by circumstance, perception, and opportunity.”
Regrettably — or perhaps fortunately — close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades — and the perceptions in our 380 page sermon on Good Things composed of equal parts soaring joy, overwhelming despair, and unbearable loss were looked upon with more than a little suspicion by the many factions of my tribe. Bluntly, the optics of a cis woman writing about her experiences with a most unusual trans woman didn’t meet with universal acclaim as we had expected and our opportunities suffered as a result — exacerbated, no doubt, by the painfully obvious fact that everyone had a story to tell during the peak Obama years, when anything seemed possible and even the sky had no limits.
Skies fall, though, and limits were exceeded so often, the backlash of the pendulum effect we now experience was undoubtedly amplified by our own refusal to accept anything less than the best of everything, all at once, right now.
Gift-wrapped, with an apology, if you please.
Our noble Adversaries are not accustomed to delivering gift-wrapped apologies. It might even be said that they would much rather disembowel themselves with a rusty nail file over a bed of red hot coals than simply apologize for their misdeeds.
By the time Trump took office, I had spent the better part of six years trying to forget Sunlight. That book damned near killed me! Three major cardiac surgeries, with accompanying side effects which trashed my liver into moldy Swiss cheese, have a tendency to force a focus on things that really matter.
Such as staying alive in the face of almost insurmountable odds. Never mind the book; I was back to poverty and despair and even surgical transition was no longer an option. I’d opted for a mechanical valve to replace the one calcified beyond hope of repair, and a lifetime of blood thinners is the only approved treatment to prevent further issues, such as another certainly fatal heart attack or a stroke that would leave me performing a permanent impersonation of a human cabbage. Surgery, my medical teams informed me, gently, compassionately, would certainly kill me and the only thing left to do was live my life as best as I could.
Assuming that I survived at all, of course. On the other hand, none of us survive this life, inevitably, and who is to say which is worse?
But the book? Ah, today, it makes me wince. Written before ten years of immersion in English composition, it’s a great example of a potentially talented writer who doesn’t know the first damn thing about writing. Semicolons — don’t get me started; I may yet open my wrists in a warm bath.
So why in hell do I feel this need to revisit that albatross and write a television series about it? Frankly, have I finally lost my damn mind?
Because it’s not done. I’m not done — and I promised that I wouldn’t rest until it was done, fully, the message carried from the wilderness of Montana to the homes and hearts of anyone who cared to listen.
It’s a Hero’s Tale, you see, the classic form of Literature, perhaps the only form of Literature that all of us can grasp as somehow essential, relevant, important enough to be heard. The Hero, innocent and as yet unformed, goes out into the World, the wilderness, and learns something fundamental about life, their own existence, and then returns to tell others what they have learned.
It’s the only true form of Literature we have, the discovery of a “new sense of self,” a new perspective, a different way of thinking, an entirely different life.
Sometimes the Heroes return to slay the dragon or rescue the princess and the townsfolk lift them upon their shoulders and cheer their name.
Sometimes the townsfolk lift up their Heroes and nail them to a tree.
My advanced screenwriting instructor reduced it to the basics: “You put your guy in a tree. People throw rocks at him. How are you gonna get your guy out of the tree and home, safe and sound?”
Joseph Campbell wrote an entire book about this fundamental concept: The Hero With a Thousand Faces. George Lucas freely admits that Campbell and his book affected him enough to write the story of Luke Skywalker, surely another quintessential Hero for the ages. It works the same way every time, with slight variations, and even we, the peasantry, the dispossessed, the faceless ones, can take on the face of a Hero and flip a magic coin: heads you win the kingdom, tails you die nailed to a tree.
Even Scorsese played with it, twisted it a bit, and gave us a Jesus who had it all — or at least what we might consider all — but the rejection of His Last Temptation was always a foregone conclusion.
The Hero of Sunlight dies. It’s a foregone conclusion.
And it really happened. My writing partner, the nurse and I, have reached the same conclusion more or less: it might have been real but still somehow it became a movie. A three-hanky weeper, an unabashedly sentimental Hallmark card, a classic Beginning, Middle, and End. Clearly defined values; nobility of the human spirit, the pettiness of evil and malice. Drama powered by Ethos and Pathos (a lot of Pathos), framed by a Logos of inconsolable ugliness and grief; a murder investigation and the near-ruination of a good life.
It may be somewhat passé in that respect; a lot of good lives have been ruined lately by petty malice. On the other hand, symbolism is a slippery thing, capable of clinging to the most unlikely places —
Like the human heart.
I have this thing here in my hands and it demands attention. It asks to be told, this Hero’s Tale, and I cannot rest until I get my guy out of the damned tree and get him home, safe and sound.
That the guy is a girl is not at all relevant. Or it may be all-important.
I think we’ll let the audience decide whether to cheer or nail it to a tree. They will anyway.
