Writing by Riki Wilchins

Fast Forward

Jaye Davidson is going to pull the trigger, she is absolutely going to pop that non-transsexual IRA bitch. I am sitting watching The Crying Game, which every non-transsexual friend and acquaintance has told me I must see, and I’m remembering being in that final, pre-surgical meeting at the Cleveland Clinic, sitting in tears surrounded by about eight doctors and a dozen perky young nurses, trying desperately to convince these sodden bastards that, yes, I am a transsexual, and yes, I want them to make sure I have a functioning clit when they’re done carving up my groin like a Thanksgiving turkey because, yes, I do still get hot for women and I look forward to them going down on me, and one doctor has asked me with barely suppressed disgust how I would feel if I couldn’t have an orgasm (and how would YOU feel if your sorry-assed wienie-roasted limp dick couldn’t have an orgasm?) and another has pointed to his impossibly feminine, delicate WASP nurse explaining patiently that I understand, of course, I won’t come out looking like her, and I am thinking of all the women telling me that I can never be a real woman, presumably like them, and now phrases like “women-born women only,” “biological women only,” “genetic women only” and “no dogs allowed” or whatever exclusionary formula is in vogue with our very best lesbian thinkers this year, these phrases start tumbling over and over each other in my head like a bunch of manic puppies, and I am thinking about all the feminine self-satisfied dismissive young Jewish girls I grew up with, went to synagogue with, hated and lusted for and lost sleep over and I swear I am practically coming in my pants here on the theatre seat as Jaye finally pulls the trigger on that non-transsexual bitch, not just once, the first shot echoing out and the surprise registering on those small, delicate, well-spaced features just like I knew it would on my father’s larger, heavier European ones, no Jaye, my hero of the moment, my trans-savior, she pulls again and again and again and again and five, six, seven, how many shots are in an automatic? until that non-transsexually beautiful woman, the kind that if we look like them they tell us how well we pass, she’s down for count and I’m telling myself frantically after four years of twelve-step programs that I’m not about violence and I’ve given up fighting anyone or anything but the anger and tears rise in my throat with the bitterness of bile and stick there like some kind of demonic fishbone and I know helplessly and a little guiltily that I’ll rent this video, not for the directing which is nearly perfect, nor the storyline which is brilliant, but just to see Jaye pull that trigger in this scene again and again and again.

The problem with transsexual women is not that we are trapped in the wrong bodies. The truth is, that is a fairly trivial affair corrected with doctors and sharp scalpels. The problem is that we are trapped in a society which alternates between hating and ignoring or tolerating and exploiting us and our experience, and more importantly, we are trapped in the wrong minds. We have, too many of us for too long, been trapped in too much self-hate: the hate reflected back at us by others who are unwilling to look at the complexity of our lives, dismiss our femaleness, our femininity, and our sense of gender itself and our erotic choices as merely imitative or simply derivative. Wanting desperately to be accepted, and unable to take on the whole world alone, we have too often listened to these voices that were not our own, and forgotten what Alice Walker says when she declares: “...no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world.”

And our lesson is not new or unique. From Lyndall MacCowan:

“It means knowing I’m a freak. It means knowing that I am not a woman. It means falling in love with girls and, at the same time, despising their femininity, their obsession with makeup and boys, their lack of strength and brains. It means knowing that both the kind of woman I want and the kind of woman I am don’t exist, do not have names … If it does not someday make me kill myself, it’s something that can get me killed”

Transsexuality? No, she speaking about being a self-identified lesbian femme in the 70s and 80s, in The Persistent Desire: a Butch-Femme Reader. There are no new changes, just new faces.

In closing, let me tell you about one transsexual. After ten years of hiding and passing and sucking up to non-transsexual women, strung out and totally desperate, she started a transsexual group. She started talking with them and hanging out with them and being seen with them, although at first she hated it. She started wearing buttons and coming out at every appropriate and inappropriate moment, just as if her life, that life God had given her, why, it was just as normal and natural as anyone else’s, which of course, it was. And she learned that although she might hate herself, she could not hate the 50 or100 or 150 other transsexuals she met, and whose stories she heard, whose tears of frustration and rage she saw, whose everyday, one day at a time courage to survive she witnessed. And she understood, at last, the redemptive power of community, and how it can only he stifled by self-hate and silence. And community, my friends and transsexual kin, is what we build here today, by coming together to claim our own, our history, and our Christine: Christine who, standing all alone in God’s own light in a way none of us have had to since, made all of this and all of us possible.