Read Online The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You by S. Bear Bergman - Free Book Online Page A

you how satisfying it was. Partly because I was able to manage that kind of interaction without losing my temper for blessed once, and partly because they got the point in a far clearer and pointier way than any stare-down or snarky comment had ever got it across. Plus, to be honest, the look on his face when he realized how very busted they were was worth far more than the fifty dollars I paid for their dinner. But busted with kindness. That’s the trick.
    I wonder about how to apply the same lesson when I don’t happen to have the spare cash to be buying dinners, or when the venue is different. Perhaps a little gender-explanatory card and a cupcake (which I would carry with me at all times)? I’m not sure. To be honest, I haven’t figured it out all that well, and often my desire to protect and defend the people I’m with is much greater than my interest in remaining centered on kindness. It is, however, entirely true that I felt great about my New Year’s escapade for weeks afterward. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it was better than I had ever done before, and eventually I decided that “better than I’d ever done before” was more than enough to ring in a New Year.

The Velveteen Tranny
    I. Theory
    I think it would be a very nice thing, to be real.
    I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been real, and so it’s a bit hard to say. Perhaps there are things about being real that I wouldn’t enjoy. But considering the tone and flavor with which I am generally, and have across my lifetime been told I am not real, I assume it must be better. Or, at the very least, that there must be some benefit, if only because so many people think it’s better than being. . . the things I’ve been. Not fake, quite. I’m rarely told I’m fake, but I can’t imagine why since it seems clear that fake is the opposite of real. Doesn’t it? Never having been real, again, I am not sure.
    I wasn’t ever a real girl, except, I think, when I was so young that I wasn’t myself at all, just an extension of my parents’ projections about me. I do have photos of myself in dresses with pinafores and petticoats, and I am certainly smiling pink, gummy smiles in them. But it’s not long before, in the pictures, I am wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, or grubby shorts showing filthy knees from playing explorer games in the vacant lot with the kids on my street. I played basketball with Michael Carroll, who was fifteen when I was five and must have grown up to be a great dad, as patient as that boy was. My realness never took hold, as a girl, despite all the ways anyone ever tried to make me more real from the outside in, as though if enough eye makeup were applied it would eventually sink in through the skin. I tried and failed, and tried some more.
    That narrative is only a little interesting at this point; only useful as a cautionary tale to parents who keep trying to paint some normative gender on their children in the hopes that it will make them more acceptable to the rest of the world. It won’t. Please, stop trying. It doesn’t make the rest of the world like us any better, because they can almost always still see that we are somehow, ineffably but unmistakably, not real, and now not only that but we can hardly recognize ourselves. It’s better for everyone if you can start getting used to your gender-non-normative child now. If you can’t manage to buy him a tutu or her a tool belt, that’s okay for the moment, but please at least invest in lots of art supplies and science toys, and stop trying to hand your boy a truck when all he wants is a doll, or your girl a pair of dress-up angel wings when any idiot—and you’re not an idiot, are you?— can see that she’s long on grounding and low on gossamer. If, as children, we can’t be real to the world, it’s always way easier if we can at least be real to ourselves at home as much as possible.
    Eventually, I was a butch. I was never a butch lesbian or a butch woman, though I