Free The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You by S. Bear Bergman

for me , I kept circling back to faggotry. Queer men can be fashionable and cry while simultaneously being burly and wearing suits. They probably—we probably?—have the greatest amount of freedom to shake up gender into something I find really fun, as long as we’re prepared to pay for it with our lives, if necessary. No queer man has ever looked at me funny when I said I collected vintage cufflinks, which is pretty well at the intersection of all of the identities I have ever had (and has gotten me laughed out of more than one conversation). For a long time I said that I was definitely never going to transition to male, because I wouldn’t be any better at being Man than I was at being Woman; that if I transitioned I would have to buy tutus, so I might as well save the money and be a gender outlaw in my original sex and butch gender. Certainly I was very practical. Certainly I understood where in the world I stood the best chance of eventually gaining realness, and so I publicly resolved—in writing, even—that I would remain firmly situated in the previously agreed-upon location of butch.
    But I didn’t quite stay there. Partly, I couldn’t seem to make my point about butch as a gender, and people kept insisting I was a butch woman or, more problematically, a butch lesbian. More than one charming femme actually said to me, “I’m so glad you’re staying a lesbian,” and each time my heart sank; each time I felt like I had been erased. Also, as it turned out, I was rather more suited to the tutu style of gender variance than the carburetor style. I was more Queer Eye for the Straight Guy than The L Word by a factor of, uh, kind of a lot. And so, after some conversation internal and external, I shuffled just a tiny bit there over the line of masculinity into something closer akin to manhood, hoping for authenticity, hoping for my chance to become real. Hoping to finally find a quiet place of gender I could ease into.
    Man, did I ever not find it (pun intended). I didn’t know, before I made my little shuffly hopeful move, about the great and terrible truth of transgender life, which is that they will never let you be real, ever again. Not even if you absolutely promise and completely swear to follow every directive from the Home Office immediately upon receipt. I didn’t know it when I signed on—maybe I should have, but I didn’t—but the transperson is always a knock-off, as in, “Why would you date a fake man when you could have the Real Thing?” (strut, strut, posture, posture), and ze is always the location of deceit.
    It must be true, or people wouldn’t respond the way they do. Kate Bornstein famously asks, when people ask if she’s had the Surgery, if they mean her nose job. She jokes about it because she has been talking about transfolks, and her own trans experience, in popular culture longer and better than anyone else, and after the millionth iteration of some stranger deciding it’s okay to quiz you about your genitals after thirty seconds of acquaintance, let me tell you . . . if you don’t make a joke you’ll scream. I could recount all the impertinent, intrusive, or arrogant questions here, but they’re endless and boring and I frankly don’t want to give anyone any ideas. What I will say is that, when I mention that something might be a personal question, people tend to say that they’re just really curious. They say this in an innocent tone of voice as though surely I can understand, and furthermore, why, I should be grateful. Grateful, I say, that they want to know more about the life and times of the transsexual; grateful that they’re not running away shrieking or throwing rotten fruit. If I push the issue and suggest that querying people on their history, former name, surgical status, and so on is rude, my interlocutor gets angry, accuses me of being oversensitive, or asks me if I have something to hide. Which is unfair, and also tiring.
    The truth is that I might not mind as