Video Tape

By Riki Anne Wilchins

(Editor's note: This work was read at a transsexual speak-out at New York's Lesbian & Gay Community Center, held in honor of the fortieth anniversary of Christine Jorgenson's sex-change surgery.)

Rewind

"It's beautiful," I exclaim. It is, in fact, a particularly fine watch my father has just bought for my birthday, the jeweled face throwing back at me the summer's sunlight. "It's ... it's..." I hesitate, searching for just the right word, "it's divine," I breathe happily. My father's face comes up sharply, his pupils narrowing. "Boys don't say divine." And he watches me, his held cocked slightly to one side. I open my mouth to question this unfathomable statement, as if certain dictionary words were colored blue for boys and pink for girls, but there is something hard in his voice and eyes and suddenly, my pleasure evaporates and is replaced entirely by fear. I know if I question him I'll probably get the palm of his hand. You know, when a six foot, two-and-a- half inch, two hundred pound man hits you in the face with his open hand, it's like being hit in the head with a ham. And so mumbling something to my feet like, "Well, it is very nice," I make a small mental note to avoid this particular word in the future.

Fast Forward

The woman sitting across from me is so butch that she is often mistaken for a man and we have, in fact, been discussing the pros and cons of her beginning testosterone treatments. But at the moment, she is lecturing me on being more feminine. "You sometimes ... I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you sit crosslegged in meetings and sometimes it takes up some of the space of the woman next to you. Some of the women in the group are upset with you. As a woman, I just wouldn't do that. We don't do things like that. It's your male training, like the men on the subway who have to spread their legs and take up two seats. You don't understand how intimidating to women male behavior can be."

Quick Rewind

I have been invited as a guest panelist at the LUST conference for women. When I'm done speaking, I sit, and there's this pressure built up in the room and the women start applauding and it just goes on and on and on. I sit, I can't even look at this stunning validation, this unbelievable, unsought welcome back into some kind of women's community, after I left all that behind twelve years ago in Cleveland. Speaking later in response to an audience question, I remark how strange it is to be an honored guest at an event that probably would have tossed my white ass out ten years ago. It's like riding the crest of a wave: what a strange thing, to be on the edge of a coming change, a change you have waited for, hungered for and worked for, that suddenly begins to happen all around you.

Forward, Normal Speed

One of the exciting things to come out of the LUST conference is that a woman is planning a dinner and sex party for 100 women. Oh boy, does this sound hot or what? I've been waiting about a decade for something like this to happen here in New York City. I find one of the fliers at the Center. As I go to take the brochure home I see on the bottom of the last page: "no men, no transvestites, and no transsexuals." Riding the crest of a wave indeed: the board has just flipped and I have a mouthful of saltwater. For once, I've got to confront someone who is discriminating against me, if only to talk. I call, just asking for a dialogue, a chance to at least explore our differences. After a few, minutes she tells me that I'm simply a transvestite who has mutilated himself, and hangs up.

Rewind

Eighth grade, math class. I cannot hear what the teacher is saying. In fact, I don't care what she's saying. I am totally mesmerized by the sight of Darlene Rosenblatt's new young breast disappearing into the cup of her new young bra, something I can just barely see as she sits across from me in her sleeveless dress. Worse, I am torn between wanting desperately to touch that soft breast and wanting desperately to have that soft breast.

Fast Forward

I am on the new trading floor at Republic National Bank. It is the third day of my nine month consulting contract. One of the block traders far down the floor is taking down everyone's name and phone extension and when he gets to me, he calls for me to spell my name. I do, and he yells back, "Riki Anne, that's cute. Where'd that come from?" "Well," I yell back, "You know it used to be Richard." The heads of two block traders down the floor, intently tracking the DOW movement on their monitors, swivel up sharply and around as if on soundless ball bearings. They stare briefly at me before returning to the DOW. My boss sitting next to me, who has come to Wall Street from a very gay twelve-year career in musical theatre, chuckles softly without even looking up from his screen. He is having more fun with this than a pig in shit.

Forward, Normal Speed

My new boss, a twenty-five year old NYU finance graduate, is staring intently at my chest. Actually, not my chest, but the area on my coat over my chest. Just about over my heart, on the left side. I've been a little intimidated here at J.P. Morgan. I've spent a year and half trying to get a consulting contract here and I'm finally in. I look down, knowing helplessly I'm probably wearing some of my breakfast or something: Just what I need. But I am not. What I am wearing, however, is my "Take a Transsexual to Lunch" button, which I wear everywhere but into work and which this morning of all mornings I have neglected to remove.

Rewind

My friend Deborah has offered to stay over with me, and since it's my first night back home from surgery, I gratefully accept. We lie quietly in bed together, she's just holding me gently. "Can I feel?" she asks after a minute. Yes, but I have a dilator in so you can't really go inside. She puts her hand between my legs anyway. "Can I move it?" she asks. Sure, why not? I have no thought on this subject, just a kind of curiosity and a small, flaming desire to lose whatever kind of virginity this is, after losing so many others. She pushes gently, firmly on the dilator as her body leans towards mine and for the first time in my twenty-eight year old life, I feel a woman moving inside me, in my vagina.

Fast Forward

I am at a private, very underground, lesbian women's S/M night at "Paddles" here in New York, invited by Pat Califia, who by many accounts began this movement. This is, at best, a completely super-marginalized minority within a minority, which New York's Finest can raid at any time they choose during the evening with complete impunity. A woman approaches me, dressed entirely in shining black leather from neck to toe and holding a rather substantial riding crop which she flexes as we talk. After a few minutes, she confides she find me very attractive, and wonders do I enjoy being whipped, because she would very much like to whip me. And as we continue talking, and I mention I am transsexual, she freezes, stares intently, and looking a bit green around the gills, excuses herself hurriedly to stalk across the room, where she and several of her non-transsexual, leather-clad, lesbian-feminist, sado-masochistic (I'm running out of hyphens here) friends can stand and giggle and point at someone as strange and unique as me.

Rewind

Dad is climbing through the fence, which is made of barbed wire strands, strung from fence posts all over this farm where we are hunting pheasant. It is freezing cold with a half foot of snow on the ground, but we are both heavily, bulkily dressed and shod against the weather and the wind that gathers speed blowing down across the open fields. To get through the fence, to separate and hold the rusted barbed wire, he has to hand me his big twelve gauge shotgun, which I hold along with my smaller, lighter twenty gauge. As he climbs through, I can see the only thing around us, the clubhouse, far over his shoulder in the lonely distance, a single black silhouette against the gathering sky, and I tell myself, I can do it: I can say I dropped it and it went off, and inside my head a little pounding begins and small quivers are starting to knot my stomach and shoulders. You wouldn't really, I tell myself, but already I can see the look of surprise, that final, complete grasp of fact, as the shotgun goes off, blowing a hole in that bastard that only a twelve gauge shotgun at very close range can make, a hole you could put your entire thirteen-year old fist through, the sound echoing off the clubhouse and back at us, and me knowing I am free, finally, at last. They'll believe me if I cry, if I withdraw into myself, I know how to do months of silent, strained shock to hide from people: he has at least taught me that. And then I imagine the devastation to my mother and our lives, and the years of questions and forms and police and authorities and while I am thinking of all this he finishes climbing through the fence and reaches for me to hand him his gun with no thought in his head but that I obey instantly as usual and like a puff of quick air the single moment of safety and freedom hits me and is gone.

Fast Forward

Jaye Davidson is going to pull the trigger, she is absolutely going to pop that non-transsexual IRA bitch. I am sitting watching "The Crying Game," which every non-transsexual friend and acquaintance has told me I must see, and I'm remembering being in that final, pre-surgical meeting at the Cleveland Clinic, sitting in tears surrounded by about eight doctors and a dozen perky young nurses, trying desperately to convince these sodden bastards that, yes, I am a transsexual, and yes, I want them to make sure I have a functioning clit when they're done carving up my groin like a Thanksgiving turkey because, yes, I do still get hot for women and I look forward to them going down on me, and one doctor has asked me with barely suppressed disgust how I would feel if I couldn't have an orgasm (and how would you feel if your sorry-assed wienie-roasted limp dick couldn't have an orgasm?) and another has pointed to his impossibly feminine, delicate WASP nurse explaining patiently that I understand, of course, I won't come out looking like her, and I am thinking of all the women telling me that I can never be a real woman, presumably like them, and now phrases like "women- born women only," "biological women only," "genetic women only," and "no dogs allowed" or whatever exclusionary formula is in vogue with our very best lesbian thinkers this year, these phrases start tumbling over and over each other in my head like a bunch of manic puppies, and I am thinking about all those feminine, self-satisfied dismissive young Jewish girls I grew up with, went to synagogue with, hated and lusted for and lost sleep over and I swear I am practically coming in my pants here on the theater seat as Jaye finally pulls the trigger on that non-transsexual bitch, not just once, the first shot echoing out and the surprise registering on those small, delicate, well-spaced features just like I knew it would on my father's larger, heavier European ones; no Jaye, my hero of the moment, my trans-savior, she pulls again and again and again and again and five, six, seven, how many shots are in an automatic? until that non-transsexually beautiful woman, the kind that if we look like them they tell us how well we pass, she's down for count and I'm telling myself frantically after four years of twelve-step programs that I'm not about violence and I've given up fighting anyone or anything but the anger and tears rise in my throat with the bitterness of bile and stick there like some kind of demonic fishbone and I know helplessly and a little guiltily that I'll rent this video, not for the directing which is nearly perfect, nor the storyline which is brilliant, but just to see Jaye pull the trigger in this scene again and again and again.

The problem with transsexual women is not that we are trapped in the wrong bodies. The truth is, that is a fairly trivial affair corrected with doctors and sharp scalpels. The problem is that we are trapped in a society which alternates between hating and ignoring or tolerating and exploiting us and our experience, and more importantly, we are trapped in the wrong minds. We have, too many of us for too long, been trapped in too much self-hate: The hate reflected back at us by others who unwilling to look at the complexity of our lives, dismiss our femaleness, our femininity, and our sense of gender itself and our erotic choices as merely imitative or simply derivative. Wanting desperately to be accepted, and unable to take on the whole world alone, we have too often listened to these voices that were not our own, and forgotten what Alice Walker says when she declares:

"...no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended. Or who belittles in any fashion the gifts you labor so to bring into the world."

And our lesson is not new or unique. From Lyndall MacCowan:

"It means knowing I'm a freak. It means knowing that I am not a woman. It means failing in love with girls and, at the same time, despising their femininity, their obsession with makeup and boys, their lack of strength and brains. It means knowing that both the kind of woman I want and the kind of woman I am don't exist, do not have names.... If it does not someday make me kill myself, it's something that can get me killed."

Transsexuality? No, she's speaking about being a self-identified lesbian femme in the 70s and 80s, in "The Persistent Desire, a Butch-Femme Reader." There are no new changes, just new faces.

In closing, let me tell you about one transsexual. After ten years of hiding and passing and sucking up to non-transsexual women, strung out and totally desperate, she started a transsexual group. She started talking with them and hanging out with them and being seen with them, although at first she hated it. She started wearing buttons and coming out at every appropriate and inappropriate moment, just as if her life, that life God had given her, why, it was just as normal and natural as anyone else's, which of course, it was. And she learned that although she might hate herself, she could not hate the 50 or 100 or 150 other transsexuals she met, and whose stories she heard, whose tears of frustration and rage she saw, whose everyday, one day at a time, courage to survive she witnessed. And she understood, at last, the redemptive power of community, and how it can only be stifled by self-hate and silence. And community, my friends and transsexual kin, is what we build here today, by coming together to claim our own, our history, and our Christine; Christine who, standing all alone in God's own light in a way none of us have had to since, made all of this and all of us possible.

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