A Different Kind of Man

I have two children. Adult children, now. But once they were small. I love them as my own flesh, and indeed, in ways that are obvious to look at them, they are.

They came out of my body.

I have no regrets about this, it’s true.

But it is also true that the experience of pregnancy changed my body and my psyche, in ways that are irreversible. My breasts grew larger and did not willingly revert to their earlier, tolerable size and shape. My hips widened, skeletally. Bones cracked apart to allow for the nurturing of a little human in the womb and for its expulsion into the world. And so the straight-line shape I had would never be fully mine again. Which is not to say I am curvy, but my form is softer for it. There’s no denying this, nor really undoing it.

It seems, too, that my body became connected, is some cosmic way, to all those many women (and those few men) whose bodies have done this same work, whose bodies have experienced this same seismic event that leaves one’s parts shifted into other places and positions.

It makes the distinction of my body from that of women all the more complicated knowing my experience as the parent of an infant was never one of being the father earnestly trying to persuade a newborn to take its milk from a Playtex, latex nipple but of instead of one who could, in the wee dark hours of the night unbutton a pajama shirt and slip a baby’s head inside to suckle directly from a hot, firm breast ready to burst. An appendage I did not wish to have became the very thing that created the most intimate of child-parent bonds, indeed, the babe and mother bond, making me in some perverse way connected to the Madonna in her flowing baby blue gown.

This is inescapable. Despite the power of language, the advancement of medicine, the shifting of social mores and perceptions.

The man is a mother.

Let’s start here: I have two children.

They came from my body, a long time ago. To be precise, 20 years and 18 years ago.

They know me as Mom.

I am a trans man, in an excruciatingly slow and measured transition. To all but three people in the world, I am not Will, but someone with a girl’s name. Those three people do not include my sons.

For now, I continue to work toward transition in private (in near-isolation, really) until it is more safe for me and for them to be more public. For now, I aim for androgyny in public, living in the sort of place where even that is only minimally understood and not at all respected.

For now, that androgyny is the best I can hope for with my sons, as well. They are engrossed in transitions of their own–to independence, college, careers, life on their own. It isn’t yet time to tell them more.

Mothers Day for me may as well be the Annual Day of Confusion. I am a mother. There’s no getting around that. Biologically: I carried them, I birthed them, I nursed them. Emotionally: they have a father who is all things Dad to them.

I imagine they will always call me Mom.

The least common denominator of Mothers Day revels in those things we extol as innately feminine: cooking, cleaning, laundry. And we reward mothers with more of the same: flowers and fancy meals out. For years I’ve gone to church on Mothers Day and invited to stand and be recognized with all the other ladies, given a carnation to mark me as another one of the ladies, asked to be happy that for this one day, I and all the other ladies won’t have to do the dishes.

Because I don’t experience Mothers Day as a feminine being, I can’t say whether this is what most mothers want. I’m not most mothers. It seems to me folks mean well, of course. How are they to know that when it comes to me, their cookie cutter is wishing for another appendage?

My newsfeed bursts with pre-holiday cautionary pieces, pleading for sensitivity to those for whom Mothers Day is painful: those who’ve lost a mother or child, those from whom a mother or child is estranged, those who suffer the emptiness of no child, those who’ve suffered at the hands of a mother. Whose but the very coldest heart could not feel at least a modicum of empathy for such a woman amidst the hyperfrenetic milieu of Hallmark’s celebration?

Still, I’ve heard no plea for Mothers Day kindness to the men–and by men, I mean men like me, men who don’t know what to do with a day that means to honor and and yet in in its honor serves to ignite a peculiar shame. I don’t blame them for such neglect, of course. We’re few and far between, mostly invisible. But invisibility is no guard against the bewilderment that grows between the joy of having been mother to my boys (for indeed, I have mothered them) and the sense of dismemberment that comes with all the naturally feminine attachments to motherhood.

In the end, I admit to wanting the side benefits of Mothers Day–I do want a day free from cooking and cleaning (for these still fall to me as the mother in this house). I don’t want the inevitable feminization the single-stem carnation with the soft satin ribbon symbolizes. I don’t wish to stand with the ladies, even if through our shared experience we are peers.

I want to be left alone on Mothers Day. But first, I think one of the boys fixed me dinner.

 

My breasts came in late. I was well into junior high before anything started to take shape, not that I was in any way impatient for them. I had no explanation for what I had on the bottom, but a flat chest made sense to me. I liked it.

When I changed clothes or got out of the shower I always put my underwear and pants on first, before a shirt, an established order of priority in case someone walked in on me. I don’t think being seen naked was troublesome so much as being seen with the parts I had. Were someone to see that, they would think I was a girl. As long as I had no visible breasts, I could still believe otherwise.

I was already tall, having passed up my older sister. I was slender, kept my hair short and often passed as a boy, though I don’t think I knew that’s what I was doing. I only knew that I’d not been called a girl, and that was enough, though grownups had a way of making the correction, which I was led to believe was in order to save me the embarrassment. You see what comes of good intentions.

But what I had, or didn’t have, in my pants was a confusion. I asked my mother once if it was possible, if such strange things could happen, that I was half boy and half girl. I could live with this, I imagined, if the top half was boy. The bottom half was just legs and other stuff that at that age I found little use for. Arms, and hands, and a chest and a brain. If that part was a boy and I had to live with this other part, I thought that might be okay. I didn’t tell her what I was thinking, just asked if it was possible.

She said no, in the way that parents do, mildly amused but not disrespectful. Just gave the answer any parent in the 1970s might do when there was little known language for someone with a body and a mind, mismatched like mine, when she had no reason to think of such a thing. Of course not, she said, just give it time, they’ll come. Not that I wanted them to.

I didn’t ever ask again. The breasts came. They weren’t large. I lived with them. What else was I going to do?

They’re larger now. Not unmanageable with a chest binder, but they retained some of the expansion that comes of breastfeeding two babies. I still dress pants first. They’d be a dead giveaway if someone walked in after I got out of the shower. They look like they belong on a woman. But all the same, they don’t strike me as a woman’s breasts. They just look like they’re mine.

It’s a quandary, to be sure. Where does a guy put a penis that came in a clear plastic bag when he’s not using it?

I bought a trans ftm packer at a tasteful adult store in Palo Alto a few months ago. The cheerful co-ed who was helping me apologized that they were out of stock in “vanilla.” Perhaps “caramel” would work for me. I’d seen the vanilla-colored soft packer online. I’m fair-skinned. Pale, really. Sometimes gaunt. But I don’t think I’d ever been that shade of vanilla on my worst day. I liked to think that if I’d actually sprouted a real penis in utero that it wouldn’t look like someone had plucked it from a specimen jar topped off with formaldehyde.

She pulled a sample unit from the cabinet below the display so I could be sure it was flaccid enough for my purposes, not too … substantial. She took hold of the squishy silicon shaft and pulled to loosen it from the box. The three-inch unit stretched to about six in her grip. I winced and touched the fold of my 501 button fly, hoping for some guy’s sake she didn’t have a date later that night. “Stretchy, then, I guess,” I said, and told her she could put it away. Did I want some help choosing a harness, she wanted to know. No, I didn’t think I did.

Turns out it is a little bit substantial, at least for wearing in public and not wanting to silently declare a certain alertness, particularly one that may not even be true most of the time. I really just need a slight presence, something to fill a bit of the void in that fold but not something that attracts attention. Where I live, where I work, where I grocery shop, these are all places that these days I’m happy if I can slip by as neutral, hoping against hope not to have to be her, the woman, Ma’am, but not ready yet to ask for Sir.

So most days I just fold a sock into the pocket of my boxer briefs, allow only the hint of substance. I suppose there’s not much difference, really. White cotton rolled up is no more a male organ than the caramel silicon, no matter the realistic veining. One is no more real, the other no more fake. But it seems on those mornings when something’s been threatened (one could call it my virility, I imagine) I pull out the packer and maneuver it into a pair of Spare Parts trunks and try to hold my head a little higher here, alone in a home office where no one can see if I’m a man or something else. No one is here to question or call me otherwise.

Once in a while when I’m packing, while I work at my desk I open my fly and let the caramel silicon peek out. If another guy told me he did this, I think there was something wrong with him. But I’m hoping that seeing it there, where a guy’s parts ought to be, might somehow help me connect to it, begin to believe it’s a part of me even though I know it’s not. Sometimes I even touch it, though if my mother knew she would surely tell me not to. Mothers are forever telling their boys not to touch it, even frightening some into believing that if they do it will fall off.

Of course, all of that is already lost on me. It’s already fallen off, so to speak. I’m the kind of guy that might take his penis off if he wanted to have sex.

Back to the question. Where does a guy like me keep his penis? Leaving it on the counter in the bathroom like a pair of false teeth could be alarming.

I stash it, wrapped in plastic, behind the neckties in my underwear drawer. I trust the sacredness of that space to contain such tender secrets, feigning ignorance at the absurdity of it all. Indeed, if one stumbles upon the boxers, it hardly matters if one sees the neckties or neatly packaged penis.

The first time I used the men’s room was at at a Target store in California. I stood outside the side-by-side restroom doors looking at the signs, large red circles with white one-dimensional figures. One, obviously a man: squared shoulders, wide stance. The other, a pyramid skirt, legs together, no visible space in-between. As though with a simple combination of circles, squares and triangles the full spectrum of human identity can be articulated.

The sturdy man. The demure woman. Those who stand to pee and those who sit.

I considered my options a full 30 seconds and went right, pushing open the men’s room door and immediately retreating into a toilet stall with a broken latch. Another man came in. I’d read that it’s advisable under such circumstances to sit a little longer, to leave the impression a guy was dropping a deuce. I waited. He left. I finished.

I survived.

It’s not always so easy.

When I stopped at a Love’s in Colorado, men were pouring in and out of the bathroom. They all looked like truckers and cowboys to me. Lots and lots of boots and caps.

My traveling companion, a woman who knows me as Will, didn’t want me in her bathroom. “It’s upsetting,” she says.

We walked toward the restrooms together. She went left into the women’s room. I turned right and kept on turning, passing the door and looping back into the merchandise area.

I couldn’t. She knew.

“Did you go?” she asked, when she came out.

“No.” I pulled my stocking cap down and put my hands in my pockets.

We pulled into an Arby’s down the road a few miles to try again. It was like traveling with a toddler. The toddler was me.

There were no men coming and going so I pushed the door open just as a man pulled it from the inside. He stepped to the side and held the door. “Come on in,” he said.

Consciously, he seemed unfazed. Subconsciously, I ascribed to him a gentleman’s reaction, to hold the door and step aside. Yes, I experience door-holding like a woman. What of it?

When we stopped at a Love’s in North Dakota, another day, another trip, my travel companions went right and I went left, into the women’s room. They don’t know me as Will. They wouldn’t want me in their bathroom.

Women were lined up inside the door. Teenagers and grandmothers. Lots and lots of hair and cellphones.

I took my spot, leaning a shoulder against the wall to wait. Each woman who came in hesitated, looked me up and down and in the same glance checked the woman beside me, sighed, and let her shoulders relax. Some turned to look at the sign, for good measure.

It is upsetting to find me in your bathroom, as it goes.

It is the great paradox of the Fox News-type fear of trans people in your bathrooms.

It is the hinterlands of middle existence when the shapes and signs leave no room for an in-between.

I’m wearing a navy suit coat today with a light grey pinstripe. It’s off the rack from a discount store, size Medium. Buying a tailored jacket from a men’s store, well, that’s more complicated.

Clothes make the man, they say. Actually, they don’t say it. Mark Twain did. And Shakespeare. Only when Shakespeare said it, in the voice of Polonius, it was more like “the apparel proclaims the man.” And of course it doesn’t matter who said it, or didn’t: clothes really don’t make the man. The man is either made or he’s not.

I’m wearing a silvery neck tie with narrow navy strips that run at an angle to the pinstripes in my jacket. Little lobsters the color of wine are climbing up and over the diagonal lines on their way to my chin. The Windsor knot exudes self-confidence, the tie-tieing websites claim, apparently believing what they say about what clothes make. I’ve tied it in a half-Windsor.

Shakespeare might have been right about apparel’s aptitude for proclaiming, if not creating things. Clothes can lead us to believe certain things about the bodies underneath them, whether or not those things are true.

I’m wearing Jockey brand shorts. Black, with a grey elastic waist and black JKY lettering. I keep a week’s supply of boxers neatly folded in the dresser drawer where I hide my neck ties, rolled up in the back.

In a little while I’ll hang up the jacket and unbutton the Oxford collar so I can slip the tie off and put it away, finish up another day as a working man in my private home office and appear to be the person I am wanted to be in a household that isn’t ready to believe what the clothing might say about a man. But my Jockey shorts, buttoned snuggly into a softened pair of 501 jeans, will still have something, albeit quietly, to say.