It’s 1972 and the teacher gave you a note. Your sneakers squeal on the lino as you walk up the hall and out the door, the click and the whine of the door swinging shut behind you, and then the smell of pollen and mown grass tickles your nose.
The brown mat squishes under your sneakers and then you’re walking across the quad placing each shoe safely in the pitted expanse of the spaces between the cracks. Don’t wanna step on the cracks now. You’re pressing the muscles under your pelvis together. It makes it harder to walk, but you need to go. It’s not so bad you need to run.
There’s something special about being let out of class alone to go to the toilet. You can hear cicadas buzzing from the oval and childrens’ reedy voices in a slow, distant singsong chant. Four. Times five. Is. Twen. Ty. Five. Times five. Is. Twen. Ty five. You imagine hanging a left and walking out across the oval to the side gate, stamping out a random cicada as you go, sauntering out the gate and down the street to the milkbar where you’d buy lemon sherbet bombs, 10 cents for a bag of five. You imagine the hard sweet texture of the bomb on your tongue before you bite down and break it, and sherbet fizzes out from inside.
“Where do you think you’re going! You can’t go in there.”
You stop, and I can imagine your slow blink, your head turning up and to the right. Before you can turn around fully, someone grabs your shirt from behind at the back of the neck. The shirt lifts over your belly and pulls tight around your throat. She jerks you sideways, spins you around to face her, shoving your forehead into fuzzy woollen fabric. You can feel the blood pumping along a vein in her thigh. Then she’s pushing you back, pulling back herself, bending down. You pull the shirt back down over your belly.
“You can’t go in there,” she says again. “That’s the GIRL’s toilet. The GIRLS.”
You have to look up then. She has white sagging skin, a honey-brown home perm with frosted highlights and a tweed suit. You haven’t seen her before. No wait. It’s Mrs Schram who teaches 6B.
You always tell me you were dozy as a kid and I believe it, because sometimes now when you act like a kid, you move slowly, you blink, shrink into yourself and look at the ground. It’s only then that I can imagine you as shy.
You’re still blinking. “But--” “If you need to peepee you go into the boy’s toilet, see--” and she yanks you to the right so you can see the other doorway, “that’s for little boys.” She sighs, mutters. “Greek parents. It’s a wonder they teach their children to use a toilet at all.”
You stiffen now, and shrug slightly under the hand still resting on your shoulder. She feels this. But she doesn’t actually look down. Or maybe she does. All she sees is dark curly messy hair and a small body. Legs in trousers made for chasing, not being chased. Eyes made for watching instead of being watched.
Your favourite outfit when you were seven was pink flares and a pink paisley bodyshirt with wide lapels. When you tell me this story, I always picture you all in pink. It makes me wonder how she could have thought you were a boy. But the 70’s was not like now. For a moment in the 70’s boys could wear pink and paisley at the same time. Maybe you weren’t wearing the paisley bodyshirt that day.
In the end--because you argue? Or because you don’t say anything? Or is she just like that?--she sends you to the principal’s office. You can hardly see above the top of his desk. Why did Mrs Schram from 6B stop you from visiting the girl’s toilet when your teacher gave you permission and everything? You just say, Mrs Schram told me I wasn’t allowed to go in there. She told me to use the other toilet.
The principal cuffs you over the head, chuckles and calls out to his secretary. “Glenys? Come and listen to this!” Then you have to relate the story again. You don’t say, she thought I was a boy. Later you’re walking across the asphalt towards the school gate and you see your sister leaning against the sign attached to the fence that says Glenroy PS. Normally she refuses to walk home with you and walks out the gate near the creek, with her friends. But not today. Today she’s waiting for you. Waiting for gossip. You turn around fast, before she sees you, slip out the other side of the school, and head for the library.
•
I had to talk about you in the first appointment I had with the shrink from the Gender Clinic. One of my friends calls her Judge Judy, and although there is no physical likeness, the sound of the gavel striking the bench echoes silently in her quiet office. And just like giving evidence in a trial, one feels that one ought to speak without the usual signs of ambivalence, clip away the um’s and ah’s, speak in complete sentences please, be gladhanded and co-operative, service with a smile.
“When did you first know that you were….. Trans Gender?” She hadn’t looked up from my file yet and her pauses were all to read various things from the letter in a manila folder before her on the desk. My letter. A letter, I remember, in which I refused to use the word ‘transsexual’.
“Four years ago.”
“So, you are in a relationship.”
“I’ve been seeing a woman for a year and a half. We moved in together last year.”
“And she is heterosexual, I presume.”
I tried not to smirk but the corners of my mouth resisted. “She probably wouldn’t call herself that.”
“Then she is a lesbian.”
“Well. I don’t think she would describe herself as…. She has mostly had relationships with women I guess, but.”
“When female-to-males are in relationships with lesbians, we don’t see a high incidence of those relationships lasting beyond transition.”
“I don’t think that’s really a problem for me,” I said.
“People generally find that lesbian women can get… After your features become very masculine, they often decide that they can’t…. That the relationship doesn’t suit them. You are becoming a man, after all.” She peer at my referral letter on the desk and launched a new tack. “It says here that you’re seeing a counsellor at the… Gay Men’s Health Service?”
“Ni-- the doctor I saw recommended the people there as being trans-friendly and good counsellors.”
“But you’re not gay.”
“I don’t--I tend not to care about the gender. Of the people I sleep with.”
“But most transgendered people care about gender quite a lot, you know.”
She didn’t have to tell me that. I know already. Lots of transpeople care a lot about sexuality, too. If you’re a real man, that means you must be interested in women. And if it’s not about being heterosexual or gay, it’s about being butch or femme. People ask us what we are sometimes and we have to confer, because each time the answer is different. Except for one thing, which is this: no-one would ever think you were femme.
When you were 10, your dad taught you how to shave. He showed you how to get a close shave by stretching the loose skin of your cheek as you guided the razor down, and to use juniper oil rather than soap lather if you wanted your skin to stay soft. The arts of masculinity came easy for you. How to distribute tie length and tension in a full windsor knot. How the cufflink should always be worn on the left side of a right cuff, and vice versa, and how the cuffs of the shirt should extend just an inch or so beyond the jacket sleeve. Someone taught you these things: was it your mother the dress-maker, or did you watch your father dress for Friday night dances?
When I think about what I can give you, it’s this history of yours that I return to: the things that make you who you are as well as those you shrug off. I think about the manner in which you receive gifts, the confident insistence when you say I should walk before you when the footpath isn’t wide enough for two to walk side by side.
The doctor would give you a big fat tick, I think, if it was you on the other side of her desk instead of me all those months. Indeed, you say you had a moment once. You thought it might be easier to drift into the flow of the cues and expectations, to fulfil them. It wasn’t. But you carry the weight of the necessity of making such a decision. You know impossibility like you know the underside of your skin.
No-one ever mistook me for a boy when I was a kid. When the time for my decision arrived, it emerged entirely from within: from nowhere, it sometimes seems. It was about desire, not expectation.
If you are the one who can always tell the difference between being and fucking, I am the one who can never tell them apart.
Sometimes I think I am almost envious.
•
1986. It’s spring and the days are getting longer. It’s been eight months since I started at this school and they’re still picking me last on the softball teams. Softball is the only sport we play, most of the time. Mr Roberts takes us out to the oval and assigns the Grade Six boys, Simon and Luke, to be the captains. This happens every Tuesday afternoon without fail, and sometimes if the weather is good, on Friday afternoon also. Simon and Luke are best friends. It doesn’t matter whose team you end up on, because they’re exactly the same. Luke comes from a farming family, Simon’s parents work at the mill. Luke is blonde and tall and a star footballer, Simon is weedy and dark-haired and pale, but they’re the same. They go out shooting ferrets on the weekends. And they both pick me last. If we’re fielding, they assign me to outfield (where I sit on the ground and make daisy chains and look blankly at the ball shooting past me when it does.) If we’re batting, they get me to bat first because then I won’t wreck anyone’s chance at a home run. This is me and sport. Often I try to sneak a book out to the oval and read while we’re waiting for the side to finish. This is frowned upon as bad sportsmanship: if I’m reading, then I’m not supporting the team.
Batter up. I walk to the mat with the bat. It’s not that I hate doing this, I like it, I just don’t know how to do it right. The pitcher’s name is Warren. He’s a weedier and shorter version of Simon. It’s been said that he likes me. I don’t think this is true.
He pitches a slow ball, an easy hitter. The ball comes toward me. I focus on a patch of ground about halfway between me and Warren, and swing the bat. It misses. Strike One.
Again. Another easy ball. Everyone is silent, waiting for me to hurry up and finish. On the third pitch, I manage to tap the ball, and it skips slowly across the field between the pitcher and third base. People are yelling, telling me to run. So I run. Halfway to first base I remember to drop the bat. Someone in midfield is already tossing the ball in the direction of first base. The ref calls ‘out’ as I dive onto the grubby foam mat we call a plate. Luke stands over me, flannel-shirt clad arm extended, holding up the ball, grinning down at me with a vicious smile. This is me and sport.
Wednesday lunchtime there’s a rumour going round that everyone should meet on the oval for a game of British Bulldogs. British Bulldogs works this way: one person is tagged ‘it’, and has to stand in the middle of an agreed zine. Someone yells, “British Bulldogs!” and everyone runs from one end of the zone to the other. (It’s a small oval, a primary school sized oval, not long at all.) The rule is, you have to be pulled to the ground to be killed. Then you’re It too, and you slowly build a team of tacklers until the population of runners dwindles and you can spread out in a line along the width of the grass and just wait…
Since I’m bad at softball I expect to be bad at this, but somehow I keep making it back across the ‘barley’ line, marked with a cricket bat at one end and someone’s jumper at the other. Perhaps it’s because most of the boys go after the popular girls. Perhaps it’s because everyone else is too busy flirting and I’m good at dodging or being ignored. But it turns out that I’m one of the three people left on the field.
I can imagine them huddling, figuring out tactics to capture us, but there’s nothing like that. Everyone just stands where they are. We three runners fan out along the maker line. Everything is grass. I can feel the damp seep of a grass stain at the knee of my jeans and a tiny piece of something scraping my right nostril. Joel, who lives next door and whose older brother Cargie has a crush on my best friend, runs out first to the left, and immediately a huddle of catchers move his way. Then Katie Miller, a year below me, whose parents run the General Store, runs out at the right. I pick a moment when most attention is drawn to them, and then I pick a line down the middle where I can see clear space on the other side. Then I run.
I get halfway before they notice. There’s a lot of yelling to the side. Joel has gone down. Then someone grabs the sleeve of my jumper from behind, at the elbow. I keep running and the jumper pulls taut, taut, and then Luke comes in at the front. He is far too big to get around. I shove with my elbows, one forward, one behind me, but they have both of my sleeves now. I hit out, in one direction, and grab something else with the other hand. Hard boy bodies with no fat to cushion pain, hair stiff with gel that crunches in my hand as I pull it. Luke yells, “Fucken bitch!” and smacks my waist with his other hand. There are more bodies now. Simon is at my right. Hesticks out an ankle to block my foot. I try to focus on twisting away, curling under them, the hands and arms and legs. An enormous shove comes from the side and throws me off-balance and the smell, of boy or of pursuit or of tension, is overwhelming. I stagger. I keep hitting, kicking. Finally, two grab my arms and two grab my legs. They lift my legs out so I’m in free-fall and my bottom hits the ground even as I kick and punch and tear at Luke’s hair. They pin me by all four limbs and someone yells, “Down!” It probably hasn’t even taken a minute.
And yet, it isn’t quite over. When I stop struggling, there’s a moment. We all stop. It’s quiet. I look at the sky and feel the heat in my pants, feel the wet dampness of the ground beneath my back. The moment passes, and they back off fast, suddenly disinterested, scowling, dusting themselves off. I scowl too. Scowling is important after this ritual. Scowling makes the whole thing doable. But a tiny secret part of me hopes that they hold on for just a moment longer, because the whole point of fighting is to prolong this feeling. This captured feeling.
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