Translator: Carolina Zanelli Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
"I kissed a woman for the first time in the early '90s.
It happened in the parking lot of a gay bar.
She was a straight girl in the mood to party, and she was dressed like one,
in capri pants, fucshia flats and a cropped sweater.
Her eyes were the same walnut brown as the spiral curls that fell to her waist.
She was 21, her name was Karen.
The kiss was her idea, and it took me by surprise.
But I'd long daydreamed of this moment,
so I praised my good luck, and moved my curious hands to her waist.
I'd expected a woman to feel soft and small, and she did.
I'd expected to enjoy the silkyness of her hair.
But I was surprised to be intrigued by the contour of her lower back.
Under the fabric of her short blouse, my fingers slipped
into the unexpectedly deep groove running the length of her spine.
Her torso felt nothing like a man's.
It wasn't simply a smaller one, but one ordered by foreign rules,
by the trigonometry that governs the proportions of a woman.
I imagined Da Vinci's anatomy diagrams, all circles and angles and lines,
as I followed the dimples where her back met her bottom,
traced the steady widening of her hips.
My encounter with Karen was brief;
there would be other women, and more exciting moments,
but I'd remember the shape of Karen's back more vividly than many of these.
'It's lucky you're attracted to women,' friends often say.
But dear husband, here in our bed tonight,
you need for me to not know the touch of a woman.
I come to you with my eyes open, still in love with you,
ready to touch and appreciate every inch of your body,
but that makes you uncomfortable now.
You want me to see you only in candlelight, and to squint.
To focus on your eyeliner, and to overlook your receding hairline.
To pull your long hair in front of your chest,
and to avert my eyes from its flatness.
You want me to map woman onto you, to not just say, but to believe,
as though I am not familiar with the curve of a woman's back.
I try to concentrate, but forbidden thoughts surface.
That a woman is a thing, and not an absence of a thing.
That a woman is a woman in every cell of her body,
too complex to fashion wholly from something else,
more than hair removal, and cosmetics, and lace.
That you are already perfect, and need not hide from me.
I suppress these thoughts, redouble my efforts.
But the illusion is tenuous, and easily broken.
You move, or face the light, and I see you.
So I do the unthinkable: I go ahead and love the you I'm not supposed to love,
the one I've always loved.
I love the remaining stubble you're paying the laser salon to remove.
I love the freckles you cover with foundation.
The jawline you stroke disapprovingly when you look in the mirror.
I close my eyes, and let my hands find the truth you work so hard to conceal,
but you forbid this kind of love.
So I hide what I'm doing.
It wasn't so long ago that this bed saw laughter, play and passion.
But these have been displaced by your one and only preoccupation.
Now there is work to do, there are roles to play.
I'm no longer allowed to drink you in, to just feel.
Instead, I perform for you, flatter you, censor myself, and pretend.
I've learned that you can't be here for me anymore,
that it's my job to work around that.
But what happens when I can no longer be here for you?
I haven't adjusted to being your actress,
I cling instead to a desire to just be your lover.
'It's lucky you're attracted to women,' a friend said to me over coffee last week,
'since your husband is becoming your wife.'
It's the conventional wisdom, and it seemed true enough at the time.
You've said it yourself, dear husband,
to me, and to your support group, and on your blog,
how lucky you are to have me, a wife who is supportive, adventurous;
a wife who encourages you to be yourself; a wife who is queer."
You've just heard a condensed excerpt from my memoir in progress, "18 months."
It's the story of how a lovely 15-year relationship met its rapid demise
when my husband, whom I'll call Jaime, came out as transgender.
On paper, we represented the best case scenario
for weathering this type of challenge.
I'm liberal, open-minded, adventurous,
and I was happy with Jaime, and I was motivated to save my marriage.
But despite the tremendous amount of effort I put into supporting Jaime,
love was not enough.
Within 18 short months, my marriage failed spectacularly.
A quick word about pronouns: it's now commonly understood
that journalists commit an unforgivable faux pas
when hey describe American transwoman Caitlyn Jenner
as "the athlete you may remember as Bruce."
We are to remember Caitlyn Jenner as a woman retroactively,
or to say that Caitlyn grew up as a little girl,
and was the first woman to win a men's Olympic decathlon.
So I'm expected to refer to Jaime with feminine pronouns.
And out of respect for Jaime, I did that while we were together.
But I spent 15 years with Jaime, a third of my life.
And I entered into that relationship as a heterosexual one with a man,
and that is how I experienced that relationship.
Jaime's personal revelations didn't reshape my experience of my past.
So I hope you will forgive me if I tell my story the way I remember it,
and not with revisionist language
that would speak more to someone else's truth than to my own.
A couple of things about my story: one is that most people don't want me to tell it,
and the second is that it contradicts the commonly popular narrative
on what it's like when someone comes out as transgender.
And these two things are related, my story is inconvenient.
The popular narrative says that transgender people
know their gender from a young age.
It says they suffer for years, and then,
as they come out as their true authentic self, they become happy.
But this isn't at all how my story goes.
We hear that males who want to transition to females have female brains,
but just before Jaime came out, he worked in IT, he enjoyed videogames,
he loved backpacking and whisky, Johnny Cash.
He even took pride in growing a large hipster beard.
The fact is gender identity didn't cross Jaime's mind until he was 40 years old
and took an interest in what's commonly called "tranny porn".
Even then, Jaime crossdressed for the better part of a year,
and he called himself a gender non-conforming male.
He said he was happy being a man.
Then, Jaime started frequenting queer message boards,
where he saw transgender people lauded as beautiful and brave,
and he saw crossdressers disparaged as kinky or too cowardly to transition.
One by one, we watched the people on those message boards
who identified as crossdressers begin to come out as transgender.
And then, Jaime became one of them.
And it was only after Jaime called himself transgender and pursued transition
that he spiraled into depression.
He quit his job, he stopped doing work around the house.
He even lost interest in hobbies.
We used to love to go camping, but we couldn't go anymore,
because it would interfere with his makeup routine.
Jaime spiraled into depression, he started crying every night,
I had to console him through crying jags.
He spent every day ruminating about his appearance.
He started talking about suicide.
Our sex life began to suffer.
And this was before Jaime went on hormones.
Jaime couldn't reconcile hating his body with allowing me to love it.
And he couldn't reconcile hating his body with using it for pleasure.
Sex became a minefield of potential offenses and concerns.
And worse, Jaime lost interest in ordinary sex
and became interested only in sex games that made him feel submissive.
What was once a loving communion between the two of us
had become a soulless negotiation.
And when I saw that my sex life would be sacrificed for Jaime's priorities,
that felt like a betrayal of his commitment to our marriage.
And then our communication began to suffer.
Jaime found out that some of his views were offensive and out of favor,
so he denounced them, and he even dropped friends
whose views were not ideologically pure.
The truth became embarrassing to him, it became unspeakable in our home.
Jaime stopped having frank conversations with me,
even about matters that deeply affected our lives,
like whether or not he planned to go on hormones.
So, we weren't having sex, we weren't talking,
we weren't even enjoying hobbies together.
This was a barrage of assaults on our intimacy
that would render our marriage unsalvageable.
My story surprises people; why?
Because the media likes to tell only one story
when it comes to the transgender experience.
That's the story of a particular happy, healthy transwoman,
who we're to understand does not merely identify as woman,
but is literally a woman, even biologically.
For her, life is hell before transition, but it is happy afterward.
For her, transition is inevitable, and it's the only legitimate response.
But this story doesn't fit Jaime at all.
The fact is people aren't getting real about this issue.
As you might imagine, my experience has put me in touch
with a community of wives who are in a similar position to mine,
as well as parents and other allies.
And the recurring story I hear from them
is that they do not feel that they're allowed to tell the truth
about what's going on in their homes.
And other voices are being lost, too.
Just last year, the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference
had scheduled two people to speak about regretting their transitions.
They wanted to talk about alternatives to transition.
But they were cancelled when activists complained.
Earlier last month, protesters turned violent
while trying to stop a debate in London called "What Is Gender?".
And Bath Spa University blocked a psychotherapy student's research
into people who regret gender reassignment surgery,
calling it politically incorrect.
But if we want to get real and help this community,
we need to ask the hard questions.
Is it possible that transition is not a panacea?
I watched Jaime's condition worsen, not improve, as he pursued transition.
Is it possible that activists are not telling the whole story,
but the story that best advances their political goals?
I went to a LGBT social at my University recently,
and I sat down at a table full of young people,
who took turns announcing their preferred pronouns.
Fully 75% of the people at my table identified as transgender.
Does it seem odd that I met three times more trans people
than all other representatives of the rainbow combined?
The number of Americans and people across the world
who are identifying as transgender has increased sharply recently.
And the referrals of children to gender clinics has also increased
by almost 900%, by one estimate.
These clinics promote early and aggressive medical intervention
for children who question their gender, sometimes as young as four years old.
But where's the research indicating that this is the best approach?
Open dialogue has never been our enemy, and it is not our enemy now.
I cared about Jaime, and I watched him become more and more unhappy.
If we want to support this community compassionately and effectively,
we need to move beyond the feel good story with the ideal outcome.
And we need to ask the hard questions.
And we need to examine all the information,
not just that which is convenient, pleasant, or politically expedient.
(Applause)