Such a GUY!

Such a Guy!

 

I have no idea why this hit me like a ton of bricks tonight halfway through the night… but it occurred to me (and I wish it had done so earlier so I could have included it in my book Womb Man: How I Survived Growing Up in a Booby-Trapped World) just after I got up momentarily to use the bathroom that I was giving off cues and clues to my true identity as a transgender youth, left and right, decades before I knew the term for it.

 

Sure, there were the obvious signs (to anyone living in the more enlightened 21st Century):

• I loathed wearing dresses and eschewed frilly girlish clothing
• I preferred plastic horses, erector sets, trains and hammering toys/tools as a child
• I was competitive (sports, contests, school tests, you name it–I aimed to win, place or show in every instance)
• I never wore makeup
• I got out of the mandated school dress or skirt the moment I got home to return to my usual cowboy garb or jeans and shirt
• My insistence on being Roy Rogers, Stoney Burke, Jerry Lewis, and Mr. Spock whenever I role-played
• I became sullen and distraught when breasts and my period arrived and whenever courtship/dating, my eventual womanhood, motherhood or any other female-gender role was brought up (I changed the subject)
• My role models were Jesus, Robert F. Kennedy, DeForest Kelley (zero women, not even my wonderful mother or teacher Alpha Rossetti)
• I was a tomboy
• I preferred (still do) animals to most humans because they accepted me just as I am

 

But tonight I realized there was even more that revealed my inner workings: the gifts I gave my  mother!

 

I still have the little ceramic lamb I gave her as a Jesus-loving child. I still have it because it might be the first and last thing I ever gave her that she actually cherished and held onto.

 

 

She gave it back to me when she found out she was dying of brain cancer because she thought I might like it (boy howdy!!!)  and because she wanted me to know that it and I were still as precious to her as I was as a five year old.

 

And this was after telling her, decades earlier, that I thought I was a lesbian, which was the only designation known to me and most other people back in the 1980’s, at which time she wrote me saying, “I’m glad you’ve found someone to share your life with.”  I hadn’t, but I was in a relationship at the time trying to figure out what the hell I was. I discovered I wasn’t a lesbian, but something else as yet undefined.

 

After the little lamb, I remember  giving her a series of things that must have made her wonder where the hell I was coming from, but she accepted nearly all of them with the same sweet smile and thanks as she had the little lamb.

 

I bought her a western arts rendition of a stagecoach robbery as seen from a hill above the incident. I didn’t even realize what the scene depicted: I just liked the era of cowboys (in my mind, I was one and felt I belonged back in that era) and horses and stagecoaches and thought the artist was amazing.

 

I made (or bought?) her a wall hanging of a matador and a bull in the middle of the traditional “man versus beast” challenge, although other men–the picadors–had pretty much ensured the matador would prevail  by bleeding the bull beforehand.

 

The last one I remember (and I remember this as distinctly as I do because she finally told me what was on her mind) is bringing home (I don’t know if it was for her or for myself, now)  a  bronzed depiction of an African lion just about to land on the back of a large fleeing ungulate (I don’t recall the species anymore).

 

I commented that the image was “amazing”, meaning that I thought the artist had caught the eternal struggle for survival in the moment just before one of the two animals would luck out: the lion desperately needed to eat (its ribs were apparent), the ungulate desperately wanted to live.

 

Mom commented, “I don’t like seeing that.”

 

I countered with, “Mom, it’s nature!”

 

She replied, “So is diarrhea, but I don’t like looking at it!”

 

That was strong language for her. And she’d made her point. I no longer looked on the image as fondly as I had before…

 

Dad had taught me to safely carry and shoot a gun. I was his default son; his other daughters were decidedly daughters.  He never could convince me to shoot any living thing with it, though… I loved (still do) animals too much to want to unilaterally end one’s life… But I was hell on skeet!!!

 

I’m extremely fortunate, I now realize, that no one in my family tried to get me to change in any way. No one in my family (except an aunt) ever pressured (or pressed ) me about when I was going to go out on a date, get married, or have children.

 

My parents just let nature take its course. I wish they were still here so I could explain to them what I am, and always have been: a male getting around in a physical model that’s utterly alien to me. I don’t want to be in it. My true identity is obscured because I’m in it.

 

I loathe being default-identified as female. I always have and I always will. It’s why I’ve spent so much of my life in over-sized sweatshirts (because people frequently refer to and treat me like a guy when my boobs are hidden, and I love that!)

 

Because my physical presentation isn’t who I am.

 

My brain and soul know this. The people who truly recognize and honor my truth are my dearest friends. The others are mere acquaintances, even if they’re family. They don’t know me. Not really. Some of them may even consider me delusional, damaged by my parents’ acceptance of my essence, or just plain wrong.

 

I accept them for who they believe themselves to be. All I want is the same acceptance. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

I presume I’ll be laid to rest as a “she” and as a “her” by them. And because I’ll already be dead, it won’t kill me.

 

It hasn’t yet. But that’s because I don’t let other people’s illusions about me ruin or rule my life.

 

I know who I am.

 

I only wish they did…

 

 

 

 

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