Pass with Care by Cooper Lee Bombardier

Author:Cooper Lee Bombardier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dottir Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Trans Grit

On the mild Sunday evening I became a trans curmudgeon, I sat circled up with two dozen others in folding chairs, all on a spectrum of gender in the neighborhood of my own. We ranged in age from high school to near retirement, many a year or less into transition, or else trying to decide whether or not to swing a leg over in this rodeo at all. I didn’t seek support so much as a sense of connection, to be among others like me. Strange to progress from the constant of change to this olde trans status with no segue, no half-time show. All flux, and then it was everything else in life that I needed to deal with.

A YOUNG trans guy, anxious and lost in a mass of too-big clothes, shared with utter despondency that someone from a doctor’s office was rude to him on the phone. He’d crumbled in the face of rudeness, his forward process stymied by the molasses of agonism, this ticket-taker saying, you’re too short to ride, sorry. He’d hung up the phone, unable to access the care he needed.

Welcome to the rest of your life as a transsexual, I wanted to say, knowing well how that word—a word that hundreds of thousands of trans people had self-elected to use to describe themselves for over half a century—could be lobbed back at me with accusations of now being a slur, or at best, unfashionable. I slouched in my plastic chair like a delinquent student. A cascade of similar tales ricocheted around the room from other younger folks, volleyed in a manner that precluded any true listening or reflection.

You think rudeness is the worst of it? I thought. Microaggressions? You cannot wither in the face of those who don’t want to help you. You’ll need to learn how to either charm them into being your greatest proponent or else clamp your will to their pant legs with the persistence of a pitbull until they help you.

Voila. In an instant, I’d become that guy: olde trans. A goddamn trans grouch. Perhaps I no longer belonged at a meeting if I couldn’t brim with empathy for the plight of this kid and his vexing phone call. Perhaps the agony, excitement, and wanting a high-five for each achievement was long gone for me. I joined this rodeo a decade and a half ago, and my ass was sore from years of rough riding. I was well-aware of the judgment that stewed in me and how little my Buddhist practice made a dip in that mucky soup. From across the room, I wanted to say, “Buck up, little camper. You’re gonna have to be tougher than this. You’re gonna need some grit to do this.”

THE FOLDING plastic chair chewed at my back as I remembered the hurdles and trials and obstacles and violence and discrimination that trans people I know had to overcome for years to be who they are. We were busy confronting and surviving macroaggressions and lack of access.

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