(no subject)

[richardevanslee.livejournal.com]

Work in progress of something I'm not sure I'll post in my journal. A personal explorationof my non-erotic feelings for transgendered persons. Pity there aren't more entries in this community.

The other night I was listening to Charles snore and wishing I could have a back replacement. I started wondering why transvestites and transsexuals awaken so much empathy and sympathy in me.

I'm complacently a genetic male. If I'd gone out in the backyard and one of the bushes had been burning and voice had boomed out and said "Richard, you can be a woman if you want." I'd've told the lord I would pass on that. I'd be much more keen on seeing if He couldn't do something about some of His more annoying followes.

But as you often do in the dark when you can't sleep I gnawed at it. It started as the insight that however somebody dressed or their gender bent they were really just as attractive erotically and emotionally as pretty guys and appealing females.

That led to many exchanges with transgendered folks. And the understanding that while I was seeking to elude gender they were often grasping it tightly. Oh there were the exceptions. But by definition they aren't common.

I never had fantasies about folks wearing the clothing of the opposite gender. Or in the middle of a radical physiological transformation. That absense didn't hit me until later. They were never a fetish. Just delighted me with their otherness.

When I met Charles my online life lapsed and thus my conversations with transgendered people. There were lots of late responses to old personals. But I just said "I'm partnered right now" and never heard from them again. I did recently have a tender email from somebody who'd been doing a search on 'intersexual' and found my website. All I say is that nothing I've written on a particular page engages the special conditions of intersexual people. I suspected that it'd be an unwise investment of time to write back to a transgendered 17 year old in Oregon. But I'm a sucker for a sweet email. So I wrote back. I was right. Never a reply.

When I came back online I found that often gravitated to 'men' and 'women' outside the gender norms. Surprisingly enough they often seemed to be communicating with me. In most cases without me guessing their status.

This morning an idea seduced me. Crossdressers and transsexuals are outsiders. Not people who want to be outsiders. Baby Jesus knows there's plenty of those. They become enamored of Marilyn Manson while he's on the cover of Rolling Stone. Read Kerouac, Hesse, Rand. Thirty years from now little do the poor dears know but they'll be discount brokers and supermarket managers. At sixty, Wal-Mart greeters.

Transgendered persons are thrust outside the normality without their consent. Mostly guys don't wear dresses in an effort to be neat. Women don't cope with the terrors of hormone therapy as a way to shock mom 'n' dad. Their lives are defined by ineluctable compulsion.

Now outsider status has long been a part of my self-image. But I don't wear any badges. To meet me you'd probably think I listened to Bruce Springsteen or Green Day and think about chasing pussy on the weekend. Or maybe have a wife and (ugh) kids tucked away.

To even say I'm not ordinary makes me feel like I'm committing an awful aesthetic faux pas. Reminds me of my favorite Andy Warhol bon mot: "There's nothing more bourgeois than being afraid to look bourgeois." Or something like that.

Outsider status is pretty conditional. Take gay men. Life for a fag varies tremendously from San Francisco and Amsterdam and Brunswick, GA and Nigeria. And many a gay man is an insider as a log cabin Republican, racist or anti-Semit.

Outsiders want to be aristocrats. But when you read Brit. Lit. writers what you encounter isn't noble creeps spouting witticism. But rich people who burp in public and don't give a damn if you can smell their B.O.

I can't tie this divagation back to my main thread. Too many transvestites and transsexuals aren't plucky enough to toss aside the ordinary jerks' disapproval. Certainly the crossdressers. I think folks who go or try to go from one gender to the other have too a strong sense of destiny to be as easily hurt by the stings and catcalls of 'boobooeise.'
`
There's a certain purity in the transgendered condition. It isn't connected to avarice or narrow-mindedness. Being merely mortal they possess plenty of both.

It engages my compassion without the burdens of futility and finality. Getting en femme and transitioning aren't like poverty, illness, death.

And enlivens my idealism. The last almost seems a cuss word, doesn't?