[Commentary] [USA] The Crossdressing Room

[Stephanie Stevens]

Gawker, USA


True Stories

Aug 11, 2012 12:20 PM 24,382 59

The Crossdressing Room

David Torrey Peters


When I was six, my mother left a box of small garbage bags lying
around. I found one, cut the bottom off, and used the cinch-tie at the
top to make a small, crude dress. I put it on and looked at myself in
the mirror. As my reflection stared back at me, a wave of well-being
surged over me, sweeping away any real specifics of that moment. All
that remained was a feeling of correctness, like finding just the
right word to describe something: a reflection of myself as I knew
myself to be, but had yet to see. I turned away from the mirror with a
new sensation of beauty and lightness buoying my step. I descended the
stairs to show my parents, who sat in the enclosed porch.

Passing through the kitchen, I spotted a coffee cake on the counter.
Brimming with satisfaction, I felt a sudden inspiration, a desire to
be generous. I pulled the coffee cake off the counter and held it in
my arms before me. In my garbage bag dress, I walked into the porch
and carefully placed the cake on the coffee table. Hands on my hips, I
announced to my parents, who stared at me with their coffee cups in
hand: "I'm a waitress!"

There was a moment's pause, during which, but for the sparrows
flitting past the windows, time appeared frozen. Then my mother
shifted her glance to my father and the two of them burst out
laughing. I held still, wearing only my underpants and the garbage
bag, confused, because I felt beautiful, and why couldn't they see
that? The notion that I should be embarrassed crept up on me—and then
with the force of a physical blow, I was. I fled the room, tripping
and sliding on the makeshift hem as I went, the plastic clinging to my
suddenly hot skin. "Oh, come on!" my father yelled back at me.
"There's nothing wrong with being a waiter."

***

My female side has always been with me, occasionally cropping up to
confuse what would have otherwise been a fairly typical male childhood
and adolescence, but I have only semi-identified as transgendered for
the past few years. I appreciate the word transgender for all those
qualities in it that other people find problematic: it is vague and
confusing, hinting at a condition but avoiding specifics. The term can
encompass anything from transsexuals, both pre- and post-operative, to
crossdressers, to genderqueer, to intersex, to whatever gender variant
you can think to invent for yourself. It's a political umbrella,
created to give voice to all those people whose gender has split free
from the standard male/female binary, a way to talk about gender
variance without having to rehash one's specific instance and feelings
over and over.

All of which is to say, sometimes I present myself as female. I don't
think that I'm a woman. I just think that parts of my psyche are
female, resulting in a deep-seated need to act that out. For me,
crossdressing isn't something I do; it's something that I am. I shift
the presentation of my body to match what seems to be a constantly
shifting gender.

The desire to do so came naturally to me, before I was fully aware of
sex or gender boundaries. Once, on a warm afternoon in the early
autumn one year, my father and I waited hand-in-hand for a stoplight
to change in downtown Chicago. I can't remember my age, but it was
young enough that my hand hung in his at my eye-level. As we waited, a
very pretty man wearing a beautiful green dress and dangly earrings
crossed with the green light towards us. I smiled at him as he passed,
and he smiled back. I felt very taken with this man and looked to see
if my father had noticed him, but my father held his gaze fixed to our
red light.

"How come he gets to wear that?" I asked my father.

"I think he's gay."

I looked at the dress. As the man walked away, the click of heels
fading into the drone of traffic, the afternoon light shimmered off
the satin so that the dress shone liquid. I imagined how it would feel
to touch.

For much of my childhood, I knew nothing about what it meant to be
gay, yet had observed that the word "gay" surfaced whenever I
introduced the topic of pretty clothes. After we crossed the street I
asked, "Can I be gay?"

My hand, clasped in my father's, was jerked slightly. He stopped
walking but did not look down. His face was calm, but there was a
disquieting quality to his body language, like the time he had taken
me sailing and didn't want to let on that he had gotten seasick. "Your
life," he said, finally, "will be much easier if you are not."

In many of my childhood dreams, my hair was long and I wore gorgeous
dresses, soft fabric, and tresses so abundant they spread out from
around me and melted into the scenery like the red water of a
tributary flowing into the blue of a bay. The question of whether I
was girl or boy did not figure into the logic of the dream. In the
mornings, I awoke beneath Marimekko ‘cars and trucks' bedding and
wondered if the dreams meant I was gay, wondered if being gay meant I
might one day wear a satin dress of my own.

When puberty hit, I found myself seriously attracted to girls and not
at all to boys. In my case, the standard pulse of attraction upon
reaching the object of my desire, twisted back upon itself to form a
two-way conduit—each new allure I discovered in girls was one I found
lacking in myself. The agony of a typical crush deepened under a
paradox: the more I wanted a certain girl, the more desperately I
wanted to be like her, but the more I let myself emulate her, the less
attractive she found me.

I remember Ashley Wenz flirtatiously propping her fragile and
carefully shaven ankles up on my desk. The sight of her bare legs no
more than a foot from my face triggered a bout of internal
schizophrenia. The white dot of consciousness attempted to split
itself, to simultaneously focus on both the aching desire to touch her
legs and on the sad longing to have my own legs admired with equal
ardor. Short-circuited, I sat in silence. After a minute, she shrugged
and put her feet back on the floor.

Many theorists agree that gender is mostly performance—with Ashley,
I'm sure there was some correct performance of masculinity that she
was looking for, but I found myself at a loss. As always, my teenage
performance of masculinity amounted to a decree of manhood by
omission—by leaving my masculinity unaddressed, it was assumed to be
as inevitable as a heartbeat. For after all, isn't it a little unmanly
to discuss manliness?

Still, with nondisclosure and assumption as my modus operandi over the
years, I found myself included in a group of guys who, as far as the
generic high-school markers of popularity are concerned, considered
themselves pretty cool. By sophomore year, I played varsity baseball
and led the team in stolen bases. I had a string of girlfriends and
lost my virginity at age fifteen. I said dude a lot. I tried not to
back down from fights.

I shrugged in agreement when the few effeminate boys in my school were
declared gay, and laughed along with my friends when they were
ostracized.

That laughter came without guilt or even a sense of hypocrisy. Sex
researchers often complain about the frustrating nature of
interviewing certain closeted crossdressers, because when asked a
question, they give two different answers—one for each gender. What's
your favorite color? Blue and pink.

By the time I reached senior year of high school, I had so
compartmentalized my female and male performances that I began to see
one as having nothing to do with the other. I could laugh at an
effeminate boy because I had grown to see my boy presentation as a
fully formed identity independent of my girl presentation. In fact,
for a long time, while presenting as a boy, I had trouble recalling
places I had been or things I had seen while presenting as female.

***

I'd like to air a contention. For transgendered people born after,
say, the late 1970s, the process of coming out consists of two steps:

1) You come out on the internet.
2) You come out in real life.

The younger transpeople I've met, those with access to online
communities, have found the process of coming to terms with their
gender much less traumatic than the generation just before mine, who
instead slunk around "alternative" bars scanning for signs of gender
variations hidden beneath the drab exterior of their fellow patrons.

By contrast, at age 17, I had a Yahoo profile, a few pictures of
myself in drag, and the beginnings of a female persona. I named myself
Tori, a respelling of my middle name.

Online, I found crossdressers had carved out their own Internet space
where they could practice interacting with each other in their chosen
gender. A lot of the interactions were somewhat transparent
caricatures of femininity: they called each other "hun" and typed in
emoticons for giggling. But behind the caricatures lurked more nuanced
discoveries: slightly different sentence constructions, more emotive
expressions, and carefully phrased teasing and flirtation. I won't
argue that inhabiting a female persona online taught me to be female,
but the exercise did delineate between femininity as viewed by people
socialized as men, and what most women think it means to be female.

By the time I got to college and had my own room with a lock, I was
ready to take a step further. I withdrew $500 from my savings, and
went to a salon that employed a drag performer who lived part-time as
a woman. After a few shy attempts to explain why I stood before her
counter, I blurted out, "I want, well... everything I need to look
like you."

Her face hardened like she thought I was making fun of her. But she
must have seen the blush spreading up from my chest, because she
dropped her shoulders and eased her face into a smile. "Oh, Honey,"
she said, in a tone that sounded amused but kind, "It takes work to
look like this."

"I can work," I said, fixing my gaze to a blemish on the counter to
avoid the interested stares the few other women in the salon cast my
way. I could feel their eyes probing at my back. "I want that work."

She pushed her long hair back with perfectly manicured nails and
appraised me with an expert squint, like an art dealer mentally
pricing a painting. Finally she gave a little nod and asked, "How much
do we have to work with?" I gave her everything in my wallet plus
whatever I could put on my credit card. In the long run, it was
cheaper than a gender therapist.

In my second year of college, I began to sporadically present myself
as female. Not around anyone I knew; even at my notoriously liberal
college, I couldn't bear to let my identities overlap.

An interesting dynamic prevailed in those early social forays. The
sort of people who wanted to associate with a 19-year-old boy dressed
up like a girl were a demographically varied but uniformly repressed
group. It was as though the people I met, especially the men, felt
nothing could possibly be more shameful, less dignified, than my
position. Perhaps the secrets they harbored struck them as miniscule
compared to the vulnerability of this feminized boy who looked to them
for validation.

***

"I'm a businessman."

"Yes, you said as much. What kind of business?"

He smiled and sipped at a tumbler of whiskey. "We deal with money
markets. Kind of technical and boring really."

"What do you mean? Do you work for a company or a bank?"

"Yeah, you could think of me as a banker—banker is fine. Basically, I
spend all day on the phone, consulting, you know? I make money, sure,
but I've hardly got the time to spend it." He took a breath and said,
"You're lucky to be a student, that's the good life."

He didn't look like a businessman. He looked like a blue-collar guy in
a suit. His hands were rough and his face sun-cured. He slid in and
out of a heavy western Massachusetts accent.

"It's not so easy being a student," I said.

"Oh, sure it isn't." He paused and gave me a once-over, "but it looks
to me like you've still got plenty of time to keep yourself dolled
up." A wink followed.

I thought about leaving. If I thought he had actually been a
businessman, I would have left; but the businessman act struck me as
so transparent, so clichéd, that I felt a sudden kinship with him. A
week prior, he had contacted me online. He said that he had questioned
his gender when he was younger, but as he grew older, those feelings
morphed into an admiration for people courageous enough to openly
dress and present as female. He said he just wanted to meet me and
talk.

Instead of leaving after his wink, I tilted my head and tried out a
coy look that I had practiced in the mirror. "Have you ever met a girl
like me before? A crossdresser or whatever?"

He adjusted the cuff of his shirt, then looked up at me with a shy
smile, one devoid of the bravado plastered over his previous smiles.
For a brief moment his somewhat amorphous features slid into place
with a silent click. In that instant, he could have been a different
person. "No," he said, "You're the first."

In the interactions I've had with other transpeople, there reigns one
unspoken rule: you don't call me out, and I won't call you out. At
times, the distance between how someone looks and the outward
expression of how they feel can appear ridiculous, even obscene—a
ruffled pink miniskirt on someone built like a Clydesdale—but with a
modicum of empathy, one sees past the ridiculous to glimpse the
intrinsically human process of fantasy and imagination made exterior.

I didn't ask that man if he was only pretending to be a businessman; I
didn't probe for cracks in the illusion, even though I felt sure I
would find them. In fact, I'll even grant the possibility that he was
a businessman and that only his inability to articulate the specifics
of his work and my class biases murmured otherwise. Still, I prefer to
think of him more romantically, as I did that evening. I saw him as
someone inspired to re-invent himself, maybe for my benefit, maybe for
his own, maybe only for a night. I let him get me a drink, and I let
him put his hand on my thigh, and I sat and I thought how lovely it
was that two people, transvestites both, one gendered, the other
classed, could shrug off the identities foisted upon them by
circumstance and slip into selves sewn from the bright cloth of their
imagination.

My nascent attempts at presenting as female publically came to an
abrupt halt when my college awarded me a research grant. I moved to
Cameroon, where I fell in love.

The day I arrived, I met Melissa, who worked with an NGO that taught
pre-teen mothers the skills they needed to eke out a living. Three
weeks later, in an over-air-conditioned hotel room, I pulled her warm
body across the bed and pressed her to me, establishing a pattern that
lasted for the entirety of our time in the country. I initiated, she
acquiesced. I protected her, she cared for me.

In my memories of Cameroon, a sense of deprivation pervades. I needed
Melissa's care and at times she asked for my protection. Destabilized
by the culture around us, I played strong man to her soft woman; me
Tarzan, you Jane—a year-long drama in which neither of us knew the
other was an actor. In deploying an ultra-masculine role as a bulwark
against the unfamiliarity of our surroundings, I began to forget that
I was acting. The theater became the world, the character my identity.

I often had an evening beer on a balcony overlooking the dusty streets
below my apartment. Occasionally, I would see a woman throw back her
head to laugh and the sudden recollection of Tori would shimmer before
me. It struck me as implausible that I had been her, only months
before. Yet, even as the beer washed down my throat, I was building an
identity that would eventually join Tori in the realm of the
disembodied. When Melissa and I returned to the United States, we were
surprised to find that the hard man that I had been in Cameroon had
refused to make the trip—he abandoned my body at the airport and took
up residence in Yaoundé, where, presumably, I would find him were I
ever to return.

***

A year after we moved in together, Melisa borrowed my laptop to check
her e-mail and noticed an online transgendered support group cached in
my web browser. She rotated the laptop towards me and asked with a
raised brow, "Um…what is this?" I could have laughed it off, or
explained it away, but years of compartmentalizing my life had drained
me of the energy. At the sight of the screen, an incredibly
fast-moving exhaustion travelled across my body like the shadow of a
plane flying above.

She stared, expectant.

"That's me."

She cocked her head and waited for the punch line. An hour and a half
of explanation later, the punch line still undelivered, she fell into
a chair, her lips taut.

"It'll be okay," I said. "I'm the same person. Nothing has changed."

"Okay. I believe you."

I wanted to say that it wasn't a question of belief, but instead I
cooked dinner for her and we didn't talk about it, continued not
talking about it, until two days later, when Melissa abruptly crumpled
into tears during her lunch break.

"You're not the same person!" Her words slurred into a low wail. "How
can you even pretend to say I know you? I mean... a transvestite? What
else are you hiding from me?" Her voice came out thick and wet, her
hair spilling across her arms so that all I could see was the shaking
of her back.

We were sitting on a park bench, eating Taco Bell. My arms hung limp
at my sides. "Nothing," I said, "I'm not hiding anything. If you loved
me before, you should love me still, because I wouldn't be who I am
without that." I paused, knowing I shouldn't go on but unable stop
myself. "And, I don't think transvestite is really the right word.
It's not, like, just some sexual fetish for me."

She looked up from her tear-speckled lap, incredulous, "Oh, I'm so
sorry! Am I not being fair to you?" Her voice rose. "I guess I was
being selfish, huh? I shouldn't be upset about how you've hidden
everything from me, right? Maybe, I should have done my research, so
that I would know all the PC terms... so that I could be cool and
sensitive for when my boyfriend told me—" her voice continued its
harsh crescendo, "—he was a fucking transvestite!"

"Please." My eyes stung. "Please, it will be okay."

She inhaled, gathering breath to go on, but saw me tremble and
exhaled, her shoulders lowering as if by deflation. Quietly, she said,
"Tell me again."

"It will be okay." I reached my arm out to rest my hand on her
shoulder and she flinched. I felt a rush of terror that she would
shrug me away, that physical rejection would communicate what could
not be spoken: that I should walk away, that it was over.

But she let my hand settle onto her shoulder. We sat like that for
what felt like a long time, my arm stretched out to reach her. The
old-world clang of a church bell sounded and Melissa stirred. "My
lunch break is over," she murmured.

"Yes."

"Tell me again."

I tucked a strand of wet hair behind her ear. "It'll be okay."

For months it wasn't. But then, after a year had passed, it was, and
we saw that it had been for a while.

***

By the mid-2000s my online Tori presentation had graduated from Yahoo,
to Myspace, to Facebook. Crossdressers still hung around MySpace for
some time after it had been largely abandoned. While there, I found
this message in my inbox:

Hey, I didn't think you were into guys, but it comes as a pleasant
surprise. Why didn't you just tell me? You know I would have been cool
with it, I understand how these things go.

It came from a person I knew. He was another young crossdresser from
Chicago I had once met for coffee.

My reply: "What are you talking about?"

His response came a day later, no words, just a link to a website. On
a site targeted specifically to crossdressers, Tori had placed a
personal ad for herself—or rather, someone else had placed an ad using
her identity.

The profile showed a photo, taken by Melissa in her old apartment, of
my body clad in a pink dress, stockings marred by a vertical run, and
a pair of heels. My eyes had been made-up smoky with copper shimmer in
the crease. I stared into the camera, neither smiling nor frowning, an
expression of blankness.

The personal ad recreated the Tori identity exactly as she had shaped
herself into being throughout my life, expressing her tastes and hopes
just as I had felt them. In fact, the page might have belonged to the
Tori I felt myself to be, but for one key detail: the Tori of the
personal ad wanted phone sex with dominant men.

For a while I mentally composed mean letters to send to the e-mail
address on the personal ad; letters in which I would accuse my
imagined recipient of stealing my photos and besmirching the identity
I so painstakingly created. But as I wrote these letters I began to
picture my recipient, and in that imagining, I saw a teenager; too
young, or poor, or repressed to build his own identity, and having
clutched at mine, lying alone and ashamed, in a body he hates and
wishes he could change, holding a cell-phone to his face while he
whispers dirty words to an anonymous man and confuses heavy breathing
with love.

How is it right that I try to take Tori from that person? Who is Tori?
Is she an entity that I own, that is mine to bestow upon those I
choose? Or in making an ad for her, hadn't this imagined teenager
(that's the version I like; you can choose your own) taken a share of
responsibility for the construction of her identity? Maybe Tori's
history is not merely what I have experienced with her, but also what
others have experienced and will experience with her. Perhaps she has
a life apart from me, and I must accept her phone-sex habits with a
shrug.

I grew up surrounded by the notion that bodies and identities come in
1:1 ratios: we get a body and an identity. But from as early as I
remember, I had a body that did not line up flush with any single
identity but instead slipped this way and that so that it lined up
with Tori at one point, or the hard man of Cameroon at another, or any
one of the many selves I've deployed throughout my life.

The discovery of the personal ad flipped a switch in the dark: the
slippage I had experienced occurred not only on the side of body, but
on the side of identity as well, so that Tori might slip from one body
to another just as I slipped in and out of various presentations of
identity. Once recognized, the logic struck me as obvious, a happy and
symmetrical discovery.

I don't mean to pretend that somehow, body and identity have been
cleaved free from one another, or that we live in a world where body
has no relevant bearing on identity and vice versa. After all, those
pictures of Tori showed my arms, my face, my ears, that mole on the
cheek next to my nose. Yet, somewhere in the hinterland of the
internet, some other person had claimed one of my identities, an
identity borne of my body, but one that transcended skin, muscle,
hair, fat and bones, as she moved through online space, until she
settled upon the imagined teenager, his body becoming hers, her voice
speaking through his throat to the anonymous man on the other end of
the phone.

And I love that, for Tori's escape is mine as well. When others can
link their bodies to mine through the bonds of a shared identity, they
loosen another knot in the constraints of the flesh. We are not
separated from the body, but we are granted an opportunity to breathe
more easily having found a little play in the rope that tethers body
and identity together. There are a thousand of ways to read that
personal ad, but I choose to see it as an illustration that none of us
are constrained quite so much as we imagine. I see it as an
affirmation that all of us, whenever we discover an inch of slippage
here, a centimeter of slack there, can, by dint of will and
imagination, raise miniature empires in the little bit of space we've
managed to acquire.

--

David Torrey Peters lives in Chicago, where he fixes sailboats,
occasionally helps crossdressers do their makeup, and is putting the
finishing touches on a novel. His writing has been published in Best
Travel Writing (2009, 2010), Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and Indiana
Review, among other places. This essay first appeared, in different
form, in Fourth Genre Magazine <http://msupress.msu.edu/journals/fg/>
.


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