Free Real Man Adventures by T Cooper

fiancé had been guests of ours on a recent weekend; we’d all spent the previous Thanksgiving holiday together at our house.
    I feel as though the split is my fault, that what I am caused an unprecedented wedge among family. That what I am caused my kids to be exposed to a family member they loved acting so terribly, and worse, treating their mother so abominably—after having shared a perfectly fun day ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, and coming home toting a souvenir snow globe with their photo inside.
    I also feel sad for my wife, that after so many years of affinity and trust, she was reminded of how little it takes for someone to turnagainst you and drop out of your life entirely, to revoke support and even a modicum of kindness or loyalty in favor of somebody clearly in the wrong. Protecting the one with the power instead of the one without it.



“IT”
    Part Two
    A T ABOUT 9:30 P.M. on April 15, 2010, a twenty-seven-year-old transgender man named Colle Carpenter was allegedly attacked in a men’s restroom on the campus of California State University Long Beach, where Carpenter is a graduate student. In the attack, Carpenter reported that his assailant accosted him in the bathroom, referring to him by his first name, and proceeded to push him into a stall, pull his T-shirt over his head and shoulders, and then cut him with some sort of a blade on the chest—perhaps an X-Acto knife—carving the word IT into his skin before fleeing. Carpenter returned to class after the incident, and a professor later took him to the hospital. The assailant has never been found, despite seemingly cooperative efforts of campus security and Long Beach Police Department.
    What do you say about this?
    Being attacked in a public restroom is one of my most prominent fears. It’s sort of like I just assume it’s going to happen to me at some point, just something I have to go through, and then it’ll be over and I can move on. Not a matter of if it’s going to happen, but rather when —you know, after an agro guy inadvertently spots me through the crack between stalls in a movie theater restroom, or accidentally pushes through a door with a broken lock at a truck stop, and there I am, vulnerable and wiping.
    When I heard about the attack over a year after it happened, I wanted to interview Carpenter, so I wrote him a short note through a social networking site, and he wrote me back. He was (understandably) wary of talking about the incident, said he hadn’t spoken to anybody about it, though he had received quite a few requests from the media. But he did eventually talk to me, once, for about half an hour on the phone one evening. He spoke throughout most of the conversation, and was fairly candid about his life, his physical challenges (not even related to the attack), and other interpersonal stuff involving his role as a coparent of a young boy, a lecturer who gives “Transgender 101” presentations at various organizations and educational institutions across the state (which is how he believes his attacker knew his name), and as a graduate student in rhetorical theory, focusing on gender performance and the construction of masculinity. I wanted to, but did not, ask specifically about the attack, which he referred to at various times throughout the conversation in roundabout ways.
    Before we hung up, I asked Carpenter whether I might send him a few questions to get a dialogue started, and he responded inthe affirmative. He said he’d read them over, think about it, and get back to me, either answering my questions or letting me know that he wouldn’t be interested in being interviewed.
    Here are the questions I sent him right after our phone conversation:
           1.  How much can you tell me of what happened that night? I haven’t read much beyond a few newspaper stories— even though I’ve imagined it a lot—and anybody who reads this will likely be unfamiliar with what happened, so I was wondering if we could