The work day had been two panicked emails short of unbearable, but I packed everything into my cheap nylon conference bag and trudged the short distance across campus to the closing dinner for a discussion group I had facilitated for the past six weeks. I didn’t sit with my group when I got there, because I was late but also because I saw an empty seat next to my other transgender friend. I always relish a conversation with someone who is trans even if we don’t talk about anything more deep than the weather or the chicken cooked in mushroom soup, because there are just so many things that he, she, or ze will understand even if they go unspoken. Many days I’ll go the whole work day without seeing someone who I know is transgender, so I take advantage of sitting with my own kind whenever possible.
The discussion group had taken place at the small women’s college that I had attended and where I currently worked. We had bantered about politics, mostly, fueled by the protests that lead to Mubarek’s resignation in Egypt and those in the capital of Wisconsin that had been burning for a few weeks at this point. During our six weeks I had tried very hard to avoid turning the discussion to me and my identity when we were supposed to be talking politics, but it was often inevitable and as usual I felt like a sort of specimen. Whenever I meet a group of new people I feel like I suddenly have to buck up and be the best representative of transgender people that I can be, because I know I’m the first trans people most people have ever talked to in their entire lives and that their impression of me will stick to the way that they think about trans people forever. It is draining to be pinned to a corkboard for all to learn from and examine every day, but it is something that you get used to as a trans person.
My friend and I chatted about his Taekwondo class until the presentation began. It was a pretty standard awards dinner, punctuated by frequently applause and accompanied by a video from the president of the college that rang hollow as our campus had slipped into budget cut crisis mode. I knew that diversity programs like this one would be the first on the chopping block, but luckily this series was funded by an endowment for diversity discussions at our college. It was a mythical fund, the name of it randomly plastered on different flyers through the course of the year, usually for programs not about LGBTQ issues even though that was why the fund was instituted in the first place. The diversity programs endowment had been started by a mother whose child had attended our tiny school. The student was widely cited as trans. We had read their name off the memorial list when our school held a Transgender Day of Remembrance vigil, because they had committed suicide their senior year at our school. What made today different from other events funded by this endowment was that the student’s mother was here at the dinner, sitting at the table with our associate dean of students.
I had never seen her before and didn’t know what to expect. She was a thin older white woman, her brilliant hair twisted perfectly into a chignon at the base of her neck. She had on a broomstick skirt and an expensive looking blouse, and her movements were full of the grace bestowed upon Southern women who had taken their cotillion seriously when they were sixteen years old. At an interval during the dinner she spoke about her child for a few minutes but spent a great deal of time talking about her family’s dog who had recently died. It didn’t really fit but I chalked it up to being nostalgic, regretful, and unsure what to say. At the end of her speech she thanked us all and hoped that this could be part of what could keep her child’s memory alive. The woman punctiliously avoided using pronouns for the student, which to me validated the rumors of their trans identity more than anything else describing them had before.
I was tired and got up several to refresh my travel mug with the good coffee they brew for events and to go to the bathroom when the least amount of people would be in there, where I actually spent time looking in the mirror and combing my disheveled hair. I was surprised when the dinner was over before I had realized. My friend grinned and left for his class, his thick white polyester uniform covered by a coat. As I turned to slip out myself, I felt a small soft hand on my shoulder. The woman was standing next to me, her perfect teeth gleaming in her practiced smile. She said, “I’m so glad you came back. How was it? Do you have the support you need?”
Confusion came to me first; I didn’t know what she meant by coming back, and I didn’t really understand what kind of support she was hoping I had. Her eyes lost their glimmer, too, and she laughed. “Are you E——? Are you the one who left but came back?”
It all fell into place; she was confusing me with my friend who had just left, a return-to-college student who had dropped out for several years but was back now completing his degree. This happened frequently, even with people we knew well. The other day as I walked past the patio where a group of queer students camped out to smoke menthol cigarettes all day, one of my acquaintances had called out “E——, E——!” before laughing and apologizing for mixing us up. I had replied sarcastically, “Yeah, we all look alike, don’t we?” only half jokingly.
I smiled politely at her and said, “No, E—— just left to go to his self-defense class.”
“Oh,” she said, pausing as if running through her mental address book of transgender students at our school, and then looking at me again. “What’s your name then, dear?”
“Neil,” I said. “I just graduated last year and now I work here in the Writing Center.”
“Oh, how delightful.” Wasting no time, she immediately followed up with the hard questions. “Now, did you have a good time at Agnes Scott? Did they treat you well?”
I didn’t quite now how to answer. As a student and now a staff member, our college has always tacitly encouraged never revealing the dirty laundry of the school when questioned by donors, potential students, or to the general public, due to a general shared desire of institutions of higher education to keep their bad things away from potential sources of money, but also because of the southern-grace, anti-gossip sentiment bred a tiny women’s college in the South. We also didn’t want anyone to think poorly of such a small women’s college that we all fervently loved—many students shared in the sentiment of feverish, draining obsession for our school. We all wanted to make it through four years that were tough emotionally and intellectually and then look back and miss it.
I twisted my school ring, a habit of either assuaging discomfort or of having something physical to touch when talking about my college—in this case, both. Like a marriage ring that had made it through the honeymoon period, our black onyx rings were symbols of the desperate hours of conflict, passionate intimate relationships, and inebriated fever dreams. Mine had my birth name engraved in script on the interior side of the ring. Occasionally I would pull it off and see the fainted reverse of my birth name on the tight pink skin that rarely saw light or air underneath the large ring.
“Yes, ma’am, I really enjoyed my time here—enough to come back another year!”
“Were you out when you were at school or just when you started work here?”
“I came out later my senior year, though there were some folks who knew my junior year—I always felt pretty well supported.”
She regarded me with a kind smile, putting her hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t make out whether I should feel violated or happy that this older person who had been a parent of a student here cared about my experience here at a transgender student. She tilted my head towards me and lowered her voice. “Now, do your parents know?”
I inhaled, taken aback by this question. It was a lot for a stranger to ask to a trans person, but very different from the typical line of questioning we often got. A question like this was often the kind I wanted people to ask me rather than, “Well, how did you know?” or “What’s it like taking testosterone?” Now that it was leveled at me, it felt just as personal and unanswerable.
“I told them before I started T in the fall,” I said. I didn’t know if she would know what I meant by the shortening of “testosterone” that was sort of an in-word with trans guys. “I waited till I had a job; they’re not taking it very well.”
Her smiled flattened. I wondered if she had taken it well when her child had come out to her. “It takes parents awhile. I hope you will be wait for them. I know it is frustrating.” I didn’t respond. I didn’t really know what to say. She continued, “You know, I just got to a point where I would let Liz say what she wanted to say. Once, we were out with her niece and myself. Her niece asked, ‘Liz, why do you have a beard like a man?’ I wanted to tell her, to take the pressure off Liz, but I let Liz say what she wanted, because she didn’t really identify one way or another. Liz said, ‘Well, I have a beard because it grew there.’ It was such a good answer.”
She put her hand on my shoulder and gripped it. “Now, you know that your parents will always love you. Even if they are not being good people right now, even if they’re doing the wrong thing. I had no idea that Liz was…that Liz felt as bad as that. If Liz had just told me how bad things were getting…” She trailed off, unable to say anything else, her voice thickened by unshed tears. She was trying to avoid pronouns and that caused her to repeat her child’s name over and over. I wasn’t sure what to do. I wondered briefly if that was how my mother talked about me.
She breathed in sharply and steadied herself, putting her hand on my shoulder. A strand of white hair fluttered free from her perfect bun. “Well, just know that you always have me. You can call me any time. Kijua has my phone number and I will do what I can for you.”
I smiled. I knew she meant it. I also knew I would never call her. I was not Liz; I was not even a reflection of Liz. I was a chubby short Southern boy who went to the same school as her child, maybe shared some of the same experiences, but who couldn’t bring Liz back. It was a terrible, impossible responsibility. She walked away from me. I packed my bag up, drawing the drawstring tight, and left.
