Very well. Second question. What is a woman?
This is a mystifying question that suddenly makes me feel extremely foreign. I cannot imagine it being asked in most of the countries of the world. Is this something Americans have become confused about? Are you going to ask me about toilet facilities? Are you going to recall the banning of The Vagina Monologues at Mount Holyoke College?
Is this something you are confused about.
I know what a woman is. I just don’t know if I am one. Or if I want to be one. Or if I have the courage to become one. I am very much afraid I do not have the courage. In general, I am very much afraid.
Of what are you afraid.
The nakedness of the change. Its drama, the extremeness of the alteration, its appalling visibility. The gaze of others. The judgment of others. The injections. The surgery. The surgery above all else. This is natural, correct?
I don’t know the meaning of that word, natural. It is a word that has been misused for so long that it is better not to use it. Another such word is the word sex.
I live with someone who would agree with you.
Allow me to propose a sentence to you. “There is no such thing as a woman’s body.”
By which you obviously do not mean to say that there is no such thing as a woman’s body. Because there are women, that can’t be denied, and there are bodies, this is also objectively true, and the one is contained within the other. Ergo…
You have grasped my point, even as you argued with it. We exist and so do our bodies and we inhabit our bodies but we are neither defined by them nor confined by them.
And so we arrive at the mind-body problem. You propose that we should reject the idea that there exists one unifying reality, substance or essence, and so the separation of mind and body is impossible. This is monism and you don’t like it? You prefer Descartes and his duality. But is woman, then, or even female, a category of the mind alone? Is there no physicality to it? And is this noncorporeal gender, this disembodied nonphysical thing, incapable of change, even though by reason of being nonphysical it ought to be as mutable as smoke, as the breeze? Or are we in religious, or perhaps Aristotelian, territory, and gender, like mind, is a quality of the soul? I have been doing my reading. But this is hard for me to grasp.
I will put it simply. To be born with female genitalia and reproductive organs does not make you a woman. To be born with male genitalia does not make you a man. Unless you so choose. This is the proposition to which I am asking you to respond. That there is nothing definingly female about a vagina. Nor are you excluded from the female if you possess a male member. A trans woman with a penis is still a woman. Can you agree with this or not?
You mean I might not need to have the surgery.
The castration.
Even the word hurts.
Not unless that is what you choose.
So we’re back at this choosing.
I could propose you call it freedom. I could say, this is your right.
I know something about choosing. I am from a family that chose to transform itself. I chose the name by which you call me. I chose to leave the world that made me to come to a world in which maybe I could make myself. I’m in favor of choosing. I have already been transformed once by this choice I made. But.
But.
If I say I’m a woman but I keep my male organ and then I’m among lesbian women and I want to have sex but they don’t want to have sex with a person with a male organ then how am I a woman if my choosing to be a woman is not acceptable to women.
If a person reacts to you in that way then that person would be a TERF.
TERF.
Trans exclusionary radical feminist.
And that’s a bad thing to be.
In the conversation we are having, that is a bad thing to be, yes.
So you take these women with vaginas who won’t have sex with women who have penises and you call them by a bad name and say they are bad people and how does that help me.
It helps you stand by your choice.
Because I am right and they are wrong.
There is a women’s private festival in Michigan and it’s forty years old, a place for women to come together and make music and cook and talk and simply be together, and these are some of the women who made the women’s movement, cis women, older women, mostly, revolutionaries in their own time. But they will not allow trans women with male organs to be a part of the event and so there is a dispute that is on the edge of being a physical fight. Trans activists camp outside the festival with weapons, and they plan protests and disruptions and sometimes carry them out, graffiti, cut water lines, slashed tires, and flyers of their penises. I am proposing that in this dispute the women with vaginas are wrong because they cannot adapt to a different time in which a woman with a vagina is just one kind of woman and other kinds of women are as much women as they are. If you choose to be an American and become a citizen you don’t have to give up everything about who you were before. You yourself became an American but when you are challenged you say that you feel foreign so you have kept your foreign part in some way intact. If you choose to be a woman the same liberty exists. And if somebody tries to exclude you from your gender choice it is your right to protest.
But what if I can’t see that these choices are choices. What if I learned from the male gay community that homosexuality was inborn, that it was a human way to be, it couldn’t be chosen or unchosen, and what if I hated the reactionary idea that you could reeducate a gay person to make a different choice and give up his gayness. What if I can’t see how these choices you are proposing, these multiple-possibility gender nuances, are not part of that same reactionary ideology, because what is chosen can be unchosen, and it’s a lady’s right to change her mind. What if I propose that my identity is just difficult, and painful, and confusing, and I don’t know how to choose or what to choose or even if choosing is what has to happen, what if I just need to stagger blindly toward finding out what I am and not who I choose to be. What if I believe there is an I am and I need to find that. What if this is about discovery not choice, about finding out who I’ve always been, not about picking a flavor from the gender ice-cream display. What if I think that if a woman’s I am means she can’t have sex with a woman with a male organ then that needs to be respected. What if I worry that there could be a civil war on this side of the gender divide and what if I think that’s the wrong war. What if we are all separate kinds of women and not all the same, and if separations, including sexual separations, are okay and not bigoted or bad. What if we’re a federation of different states of being and we need to respect those states’ rights as well as the union. I’m losing my mind trying to work all this out and I don’t even know the words, I’m using the words I know but they feel like the wrong words all the time, what if I’m trying to live in a dangerous country whose language I haven’t learned. What then.
Then I would say, we have work to do to break the cotton ceiling in your head.
Which is.
Underwear is made of cotton. The contents of a trans woman’s underwear act as an axis to oppress and marginalise her. Quote unquote.
Somebody told my girlfriend a joke about becoming a transbillionaire. I identify as a billionaire and so now I’m rich, she said. How would you respond to that?
That isn’t funny.
[He] reached the threshold but [he] never entered the room. Trapped between the fear and the language, [he] found [himself] unable to move, but [he] couldn’t stay where [he] was, either. The warning signs were plain enough. Riya got a call from the 2-Bridge girls’ club telling her, not unkindly, that they had had to ask [him] to stop coming in, because [he] had begun to importune the girls with intensely personal questions and they were no longer comfortable with having [him] around. The atmosphere at 2-Bridge was at once relaxed and committed, the girls felt at ease and worked hard in social justice or environmental education programs, or learning digital and audio arts, or doing introductory STEM co
urses, or helping to run the building’s astonishing planetarium (a gift from a wealthy benefactor), or studying dance or nutrition. I visited [him] there in the early days of [his] volunteer work, before the downward spiral began, and [he] seemed happy around their happiness, and their relaxed attitude to gender diversity seemed to help [him]. Gay or straight, cis or trans, asterisk or no asterisk, genderqueer or agender, none of this was a problem. At first this was encouraging, even exciting, but as [he] confronted [his] own roadblocks to transition, [his] physical and social fears and [his] difficulty with the new language, it didn’t help [him] to think that [he] might be suffering from generational problems, by which the generation following [him] was untroubled. I thought of the early Neanderthals in Golding’s The Inheritors looking with anger and uncomprehending envy upon the new, more sophisticated, fire-owning human race, Homo sapiens, when it showed up for the first time and doomed them, the forerunners, to extinction. So [he] began to see [himself] as a primitive entity, and the girls at 2-Bridge as the new people who were better than [he] was but who were also [his] replacements, able to go where [he] could not, able to enter the promised land which was barred to [him] by the limitations of [his] perceptions. So [he] began to harry them, to corner them in the canteen or at the doors of their classrooms or at play on the nearby softball field or hockey rink, to ask for answers they did not have and advice they did not know how to give, and, becoming aggressive, to upset them. [His] dismissal was inevitable. [He] accepted it without demur.
We took our eyes off [him]. No question of that. We should have seen [his] growing fragility and maybe we did but we all chose to look elsewhere. After Apu’s murder Nero Golden withdrew from all society into a darkness whose apparent cause was obvious but whose more occult meaning would only later become clear. He kept the urn containing his son’s ashes on his desk and, it was said, talked to him continually, every day. The two dragon ladies had access to him, and he made time for Petya, always made time for his most obviously troubled child, was constantly forgiving and supportive as Petya slowly made his way back from arson to his better self; but for his rudderless and crashing no-longer-youngest son he had next to nothing. What he did have was young Vespasian and a wife who found many ways of insisting on the infant’s special claims on his father’s affections. Little Vespa, they called him, as if he were a motor scooter they could both ride back to happiness. In little Vespa’s company Nero’s face was sometimes softened by a smile. Vasilisa treated her husband with the same motherly care she lavished on her young pride and joy, in part, I’m sure, because she saw and wanted to lessen his grief, but also, I have no doubt, for selfish reasons. Of all of us she was the one who saw most clearly the dwindling of this bullish and ferocious man. She saw the advance of his forgetfulness, the loosening of his grip on the chariot reins, and understood that in time he would be her baby too, and all this she was willing to accept because the prize at the end of her project was very great. (My thoughts regarding Vasilisa had soured considerably since the birth of my son and the wall she subsequently erected between the boy and me.) Vasilisa’s mother was in the house too but Nero had taken against her and Vasilisa kept her headscarfed babushka away, essentially using her as little Vespa’s nurse. In their relationship, it was clear, the mother had no power. She did as she was told. And she too was biding her time. She too knew the nature of the game that was being played. She stayed in the background and sang Russian songs to the boy and told him Russian stories, including perhaps the story of Baba Yaga, the witch, so that he could grow up knowing the score. If she had been able to read children’s books in the English language she might have said that Vespasian was the golden snitch.
I took my eyes off D Golden too. All that summer and fall Suchitra and I were busy with the Batwoman. In that electorally surreal year our sudden elevation by the video awards system to the status of political-ad stars had attracted the attention of progressive advocacy groups and big-money super-PACs supporting the Joker’s formidable, eminently qualified but unpopular opponent. The animated cartoon we made for one such advocacy group, with the help of some of the best artists ever to draw the Joker, went viral, the grinning villain in midtown New York screeching out lines his political incarnation had actually used, sneering at his own party, The fools! I could shoot someone dead in Times Square and I wouldn’t lose any votes! until a female superheroine in bat-gear swooped down to put him in a straitjacket and hand him over to the white-coated men from the funny farm. Political Batwoman was born and the candidate, or her people, reposted our ad on the official social media of the campaign, and it got three million hits in the first twenty-four hours, and in the end we made three follow-ups that all did just about as well. The election became a contest between the Batwoman and the Joker—Batwoman, who owned her dark side, but used it to fight for good, justice, and the American way, a leader who could save the country from becoming a calamitous Joke. We defined the struggle; it became what we said it was.
The Batwoman idea was Suchitra’s, though a lot of the scripting was done by me, or by the two of us together. We were a good team, but I kept wondering what she saw in me; we were so unequal, her nonstop creative brilliance so much brighter than my own little light, that there were times when I felt like her pet. Late one night when we were done with work I had enough to drink and asked her, and she laughed and laughed. “What a pair we are,” she said, “both of us so insecure and neither of us aware at all of the other’s insecurity.” Didn’t I see? I was the one with the education, I was the intellectual, I was the one who saw connections and references and echoes and arguments and shapes, she just knew how to point the camera and do a lot of other tech stuff. And that was absurdly undervaluing herself, but now it was her insecurity speaking. I reminded her of just one of the beautiful things she had taught me. An image has a shape and so does sound and so does montage and so does drama. The film sense is that art which ensures that the four shapes are the same. This was her adaptation of the theories of Sergei Eisenstein, director of Alexander Nevsky and The Battleship Potemkin. “Okay,” she conceded with a grin when I reminded her. “Yeah, okay, that was pretty good.”
Those confessions—my sense of creative inferiority, her feeling of intellectual lessness—brought us much closer. This is how we are: we fall in love with each other’s strengths, but love deepens toward permanence when we fall in love with each other’s weaknesses. We fell into the love that had been lying beneath our love like water below ice, and understood that while we had been having a lot of fun together we had been only skating on the surface, and now we were in as deep as we could go. I had never had a feeling like it, and nor had she, she said, and we stared at each other in a kind of happy disbelief. So this was where my attention was. As the Golden family plummeted, I soared. We soared, my honey lamb and I, and like the hawk in Oklahoma!, we made lazy circles in the sky.
“Oh, incidentally,” she said, somewhere in the middle of the bliss, “you know those three rules that I may have mentioned?”
“ ‘Make your own money, get your own apartment, and don’t ask me to marry you.’ Yes?”
“I think they may be negotiable.”
“Oh.”
“ ‘Oh’? Really? That’s all you’ve got?”
“I was just wondering,” I said, “how to break the news to my landlord, U Lnu Fnu.”
“For catfish,” said U Lnu Fnu, “I go sometimes to the Whole Foods on Union Square, but they don’t always have. Otherwise to Chinatown. Also necessary, vermicelli noodles, fish sauce, fish paste, ginger, banana stem, lemongrass, onions, garlic, chickpea flour. Sit and be patient, please. This is traditional breakfast of my country: mohinga. Sit down, please.”
“Mr. U,” I began. He stopped me with a gentle raised arm. “Now at the end I must correct you,” he said. “You know, this ‘U’ is not a name, but a title of respect given to older men holding senior positions. Also to monks. So ‘Mr. U’ is like saying, ‘Mr. Sir.’ Lnu was my father’s name which I al
so took. You should address me as Fnu. That is best.”
“Mr. Fnu…”
“Fnu. Now we are friends. Eat your mohinga.”
“Fnu.”
“I know what you want to say. You want to go and live with your girl, so you are giving notice, but because you love the Gardens you want to ask if it is possible to keep the access key. And because you are polite and you know I am living in solitude you will say, you have come to be very fond of me, you want often to pay a visit, and yada yada yada.”
“You watched Seinfeld?”
“Every episode, also now reruns.”
“How did you know?”
“Your girl, she called me, because she knows you become tongue-tied when you have to ask for something. Which it is my pleasure to give. Keep the key. I will rent your room to someone else, naturally, but you are always welcome to pass by.”
“The Gardens are so beautiful at this time of year.”
“I will never go home,” the old diplomat said. “Not even to the changing Myanmar of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. There is a point on the journey at which the traveler sits down by the river and knows it’s the end of the road. There is a day when he accepts that the idea of return is an illusion.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, not finding any better words.
“Also the Goldens are so interesting, aren’t they,” said U Lnu Fnu, cheering up, actually clapping his hands, and revealing a hitherto unsuspected catty side to his character. “They are falling apart as one watches, and nowadays I have a lot of time to watch.”
What sort of man was I, breakfasting on fish and noodles with an elderly lonely Burmese (Myanmaran) gentleman and pretending my love for the Gardens was merely horticultural and nostalgic. What sort of man, planning to live with the woman who loved him, preserved his ability to enter the secret space where his secret child was to be found, daily, in a stroller, guarded by a fierce Russian matriarch; and yet kept his fatherhood secret, even from his true love. What sort of man, raised in that very space by people of principle, raised to be honorable and true, would succumb as readily as he had to a siren’s call. Perhaps all men were traitors. Perhaps good men were just traitors who had not yet reached the fork in their road. Or perhaps my desire to generalize from my own behavior was just a way of excusing myself for what I had too easily done.