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

much if I didn’t understand so well what was going on. I might be willing to believe that there was some sort of innocent educational journey at work every single one of those times, if I hadn’t already answered those questions over and over only to discover that each of my questioners was using the information to decide whether or not I was real. I say that my name is Bear, and when I am asked if I have changed my first name to Bear, I say no, it’s my middle name. Not real enough. When people learn that my grandmothers still call me Sharon, it’s further proof: not the real deal. These judgments are made about surgeries, about hormones, about sexual orientation, and people who ask them—the same people who moments before claimed the need for my tender educational mercies—are now the gender judge and jury.
    Transpeople lose a number of things when we transition. We can lose family, friends, jobs, children, lovers, and money. But the most difficult thing for me to lose has been veracity. I was already used to not being real, but now I don’t even seem to be trustworthy. I’m not a reliable reporter about my sex or my gender or even my own name; I cannot be trusted to be my own expert. In each of those querying moments, what I am being asked for are details so someone else can make the final decision—am I real yet? So they can decide what they want to call me or how they want to refer to me or if I deserve the pronouns I have requested (and therefore asserted to deserve). I’m only truthful if they decide, after assessing the facts, that my actions mean I deserve the identity that I am claiming. I only get to be real if they say so.
    It’s tempting to make the comparison to the Velveteen Rabbit, and tidy as well—and you know essayists; we love to wrap up a good metaphor with a pithy ending. Here I just say that I know I’m real, that I believe in it fully, and if I can become real to just one person it’s enough to sustain me. But unlike the Velveteen Rabbit, who was redeemed from death through love but never allowed to be near his love again, it takes more than one person believing in my realness. It takes cultural change. And so this essay doesn’t really end as much as it stops. I’ll let you know if I ever get more real.
    II. Practic e
    I had a long, difficult conversation with my old friend and mentor John last year. I was talking about someone important to me who had a new lover, and I referred to him as her boyfriend. John stopped me mid-sentence to ask, “A transsexual guy?”
    I’m afraid I kind of lost my composure. I snapped back, none too kindly, something snotty like, “Are you seriously asking me about the genitals of some dude you don’t even know?” and we let the matter drop and went for lunch. But as is so often the case with people to whom we are close, we circled around back to it again in our way, after our feelings had cooled a little, after I was ready to talk to my old friend as a friend and not as a full-time professional gender warrior (which is, or should be, the right of friends). After a few weeks, he sent an email with a chatty first paragraph and then, after a tentative opening, he wrote this:
    At the baggage carousel, I was, indeed, asking about the genitals of someone dating [name redacted]. There are all kinds of reasons why my question was socially problematic, and deserving of a dismissive or indignant response—but your particular indignant response, as I read it, seemed to have as its subtext, “Why on earth should genitals matter in the least?”
    I know full well that sex and gender are different things and I’m well aware of, and fully support, the deconstruction of those parts of the sex-gender dynamic that are constructed, which is to say almost all of it. But genitals seem to matter a lot to people who have them, regardless of their sex or their gender. Which means, I think, that they must matter in any discussion of a human relationship between people