Accidently Gay

Twenty-five years ago, my husband looked at me and said “I do”. I thought that would be the happiest moment of my life, but it wasn’t. Instead, today is the happiest moment of my life, and each day is just getting better.

For our twenty-fifth anniversary on Halloween of 2017, we were boring old people. He had cooked us dinner of salmon and some side dishes, and I cleaned the kitchen and we enjoyed a quiet meal together.

Afterwards we laid in bed and watched some shows and just talked about our day. We even found it funny that our cat ghost had to force himself in between us, because evidentially it isn’t allowed we touch each other, we both have to touch him instead. We avoided any conversation involving work and his transition. We just spent time with each other. It was a magical evening.

We had originally planned a to-do for our “big 25” that included a Los Vegas wedding vow renewal with dueling Elvis Impersonators, a pink Cadillac. We had been surprised at how relatively cheap it was for a renewal ceremony, even with the hotel and flight down. Sadly, our life has been pretty hard with work and the death of both of my parents who were our only real familial support. Additionally, were trying to pay back the debt from paying for both of their funerals. Instead, we chose to stick close to home.

Even so, our anniversary was spectacular. I have no regrets about how we spent the time. Just lying next to my husband, hearing his voice, and feeling his skin against mine (when the cat wasn’t objecting). It was a fantastic night of us just being together as lovers, spouses, and best friends.

I think back to when we first got married, and truth be told, I didn’t know what the future held. Many of my friends had divorced within a year or two. At the time my husband made it clear that he was like a stray cat. He believed he would never get married, nor have a long-term relationship and that we should just enjoy the time we had together. He put this forward for years as his ideal relationship, but in the end he had asked me to marry him. I wasn’t sure what time would bring, and I anticipated he would have grown bored soon enough and moved on. Yet here we are.

All I can think of now is that our marriage brought me something far beyond anything I could have hoped for. I never imagined I would be in love with a guy, and that the sight of him would excite me mentally, emotionally, and physically. That he would have been the same person, with the same green eyes who was a cute punk girl who crawled in my window at the age of 19 because I left “her” cans of Ravioli’s for when she was hungry.

Twenty-five years is a long time to some. It literally was a lifetime with my wife as her life ended and the life with my husband started. For me though, it hasn’t been long enough. I feel confident we will probably get another twenty-five years, or more if I have my way, and it still won’t be long enough.

The Harvey Weinstein issue has been hitting the front page of the internet, and I have been reading a lot of reactions to men who say they didn’t see it. Because I lived for 40 years as a woman and all the harassment that entailed, and now live as a man, I have a few insights into this issue.

I want to say when I lived as a woman, I thought harassment was a normal daily event for everyone. Whether it was creepers on the bus, guys cat calling form cars, dudes approaching me in the grocery store, it happened all the time.

I remember vivid incidents when I was especially young of just horrific scary violent harassment. The younger, and more feminine you look, the more predators target you. Predators target their victims well, and look for vulnerability.

I remember walking home from high school, where I looked 12 rather than the 16 I was, and a man tried to give me a ride. When I refused politely, and thanked him, he started screaming he would cut my head off, and pealed out so fast and close to me, that I thought I was going to be hit by his car.

That doesn’t even count the times a grown ass man has reached over to grab a breast, my ass, or physically pushed me to sleep with him. I have been sexually assaulted, harassed, and even raped as a woman.

However, due to the prevalence of this kind of harassment and assault, I only ever counted the rape. It wasn’t until I was much much older, that I realized that living in a world where I felt I had to downplay these types of harassment was not my problem. It was a world problem.

I did not identify the creep on the bus that kept touching me as harassment because I didn’t want to be “one of those girls” and “make a big scene”. There is a lot of pressure on women to avoid confronting or speaking about men that prey upon them. You don’t want to be any trouble, and often people around you will enforce this.

This brings me to my transition. I’ve talked before about how all that disappears. Once you are read as male, every creepy shitbag predator just evaporates. It’s like you don’t even see it anymore.

This is because these men are not random in their harassment. They do it to their victims, which are vulnerable. They often don’t do it around anyone else unless they are sure bystanders will be complicit in the behavior.

It’s an overwhelmingly successful strategy. Even a stand up guy, that would never condone that kind of behavior might have a hard time believing how prevalent this is because it’s so out of sight for him. It would be an alien concept to think a man would just drop trou and whack off to a 14 year old girl on the bus, on his way to a job that requires wearing a suit.

Once I was reliably read as a cis gendered man by the world, the very most I would get was occasionally an off colored joke in my presence. I almost never actually see the harassment that goes on every day for women, anymore.

It’s hard to differentiate crap socially acceptable jokes that are shitty to women and minorities from actual predatory behavior. Some guys just tell tacky unreflective jokes as a way to fit in, and some predators use it as a way to test the waters. If you aren’t really into the joke, a predator moves on to other people.

I had a racist guy try on a racial slur in my presence recently, and I asked him what the hell was wrong with him. He has steadfastly never once revealed any obviously indication of racism in my presence again. Yet, he shops Hitler picks to my other friends that froze in horror and laughed nervously as a reaction. He chooses who he shows this kind of thing to. I was strategically not a target for his shit anymore. He moved on to people that would not call him out.

This is why the people that predators surround themselves either just don’t care, if they are not shitty predators themselves. The Harvey Weinstein’s of the world, are careful to cultivate that, and enforce it with whatever power they have. (I know, if a guy is powerful enough, he can enforce acceptance of his harassment and assaults in the people around him, but that’s a totally different issue to what I’m talking about.)

My years of living as a woman are fading in the distance of time for me, but as I continue my life being accepted as male I have a couple of possible solutions.

The first is to take women at their word when they tell me they are uncomfortable around some men. No questions, and no issues. I know from first hand experience that I was not believed in so many small ways, so to believe women when they say they are being harassed is important.

When a woman makes it past the socially constructed barrier to make a fuss, she has already thought about the issue forever. She has dissected it, and weighed the possibility of “making a scene” versus how dangerously uncomfortable the predator makes her feel.

Secondly, I make it clear when the jokes come out about sexual assault (and racism) that I don’t think it’s funny. I am not going to give any social approval by laughing. I’m a bit more confrontational than most, but I feel it’s important not to be a part of a cultivated approval network for a guy that thinks he can get away with this kind of behavior.

However, by doing this, it means I will not see this kind of harassment or assault happen almost at all. By believing women, and not approving of these testing behaviors, predators will almost never engage in this behavior around me.

This is why good stand up men say they don’t see the harassment happen. Predators have identified them as someone that will not condone their behavior, and strategically prey upon their vulnerable victims elsewhere.

The best we can do, is make sure to be vigilant, keep a protective eye out towards those that are vulnerable to predation, and believe victims when they come forward.

I haven’t written an article for a while. I’ve been occupied by my job and my surgeries. However, I was listening to the Nancy podcast, and they had a prompt for what it’s like being out of the closet at work. I’ve been thinking about this anyways, but I thought I would write down a bit of it.

Being an out transgender man, in a super gay marriage at work means people self select on if they want to have anything to do with me before I even get to the word, “Hello.” People who have a problem with queer folks will automatically avoid me. This isn’t necessarily bad. However, it has led to some awkward interactions where I can’t tell if they avoided me because of that, or they somehow failed out of being human beings when it comes to polite work interactions.

Being out at work means that the folks that don’t have a problem with LGBT folks make it a point to have my back clearly. I’ve never in my life seen so many straight folks make a point to be clear about supporting queer folks. It’s awe inspiring sometimes.

Especially in this crazy Trump/Pence inspired attack on transgender people having basic rights. When the Trump ban on transgender people serving in military came down, a large number of my coworkers were furious about it. They wanted my husband and I to know they felt it was a total injustice. It felt nice to walk into a place where I knew so many amazing allies. If I wasn’t out at work, I would have never known.

Being out at work as a transgender man, means I use the bathroom farther from the office, so I don’t make people uncomfortable, and they don’t get weird and awkward to me when I am in there. I try to stay as predictable as possible in my bathroom habits to avoid that frozen deer in the headlights thing that happens when some dude is forced to share bathroom space with a known trans guy, and is obviously uncomfortable about it.

Being openly transgender in the office means I think about this bathroom issue every single time I have to pee. Bigots are sometimes like a Jack-in-the-Box. It’s all nice pleasantries until they spring out. In my experience, sometimes I am complete shocked by the people that suddenly freak out about my being transgender. It’s like they had to think about it, talk to their friends, get some courage from some church somewhere, before they feel they have enough backing to spring. So yeah, I think about this every single time I have to pee.

Being out at work means having to listen to a coworker spend a year telling my husband and I how he supports bathroom bills, banning trans folks from the military, and general anti trans fuckery disguised as “debate.” As if not being allowed to pee in the appropriate bathroom, or kicking transgender soldiers out of the military is a debate. Sneering at the loss of my medical because “Is that all?” as if getting testosterone, or surgery is somehow an affront. Oh yeah, and nothing says you are a dick, like loudly discussing how you are pissed your tax dollars might go to a transgender person’s health care, two seats down from a real live transgender person.

Being out at work, and getting bottom surgery that I am are not hiding, means I get asked a lot of questions. I am cool with the questions, until the person that is super anti-trans uses this openness to attempt to affirm their erroneous backwards anti-transgender biases. In a lot of ways, this was a cool experience, and I got to see so many supportive gestures, and I got to do some actual education on the topic. It was totally cool.

Being out at work means sometimes allies are shocked and disappointed to realize you are a normal guy, with normal foibles. I think allies sometimes want to swoop in and protect LGBT folks, and it’s sometimes shocking that we aren’t “Will and Grace” gay. We are grumpy in the morning, stressed about deadlines, and not agreeable all the time. Sometimes I can see the exact moment I fall off the rainbow pedestal.

Being out at work means, I sometimes see a flood of people digging into my LinkedIn. I see this in waves, usually when folks find out I am transgender. I work for the Department of Defense, and I know when the contractors find out, because I get a flood of them looking at my LinkedIn. Otherwise I’m not in a noteworthy enough position for it to warrant that kind of thing. Plus, nobody else around me ever gets these little floods.

Being out at work means I get to see folks evolve on the issue of LGBT people. Sometimes I see folks go from not thinking or being outright against our existence, to being shockingly supportive. This one makes it worth while to talk to people openly about their questions, for me. It’s nice to have someone come back a year later, and tell me how they really changed their views because before they had never known anyone like me.

I have tried being closeted about being transgender on the job, and it was one of the worst experiences in my adult life. Being closeted was more about attempting to be careful about what I said, or referred to. It meant that if folks suspected, they dug into my life online, to prove I “wasn’t a man”.

While being out at work is definitely a mixed bag, I am not sure I want to go back in the closet, though. It’s definitely something every transgender person has to consider when entering a new work position.

If I wasn’t out at work, I would not have seen the amazing folks step up in this current political climate. I would not have been able to see how amazing day to day work is when you don’t have to hide your identity. It’s not without it’s frustrations, as an out transgender man, but my only option is to hide, or be out. I prefer out.