When I first started dating Dawna, I think I might have been the first transgender person some of the folks up in Rocky Ford had ever actually met.
And you know what? For the most part, they were genuinely nice people.
That's something I've found pretty consistently throughout the motorcycle community. Most bikers don't give a flying fuck who you are, where you came from, what you look like, or what you've got going on underneath your clothes. Treat people decently, treat them fairly, don't be an asshole, and you're generally going to get along just fine.
It's one of the things I love about bikers. For a group of people who tend to look pretty fucking intimidating to outsiders, they're often considerably more accepting than the supposedly enlightened people who spend half their lives lecturing everybody else about acceptance.
But there were a couple of people who had a harder time wrapping their heads around the whole transgender thing.
And hey, I get it.
If you've never knowingly met a transgender person, if you've never had a reason to think about gender identity beyond whatever you've experienced in your own life, then sure, it's going to seem unfamiliar. Maybe even a little strange.
That's not necessarily bigotry. Sometimes it's just unfamiliarity.
I don't expect everybody I meet to have a comprehensive understanding of gender identity. Hell, I spent a significant portion of my own life trying to understand what the fuck was going on with me, and I had the advantage of actually living inside my own head.
So I'm generally pretty patient with people who have genuine questions.
Generally.
Because there's a difference between trying to understand something and being so determined to fit it into a framework you already understand that you refuse to consider the possibility that your framework might be missing a few fucking pieces.
And one particular fellow seemed to be having a hell of a time with that distinction.
For whatever reason, he became almost unnaturally fixated on the fact that I was transgender.
Not for a few minutes. Not for one conversation over a beer.
For a long fucking time.
Hell, for all I know, he's probably still sitting somewhere trying to figure it out.
Now, I'll give him credit for one thing. He actually had the courage to ask questions.
A lot of people don't. They wonder, they speculate, they make assumptions, and then they go home and talk about it with somebody else who doesn't know any more than they do.
At least this guy asked me directly.
And I tried to answer him.
I really did.
But here's the thing. I'm not a medical professional. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a psychologist. And I'm certainly not a professor of gender studies, whatever the fuck that entails.
I'm just a woman who happens to be transgender, trying to explain something she's lived with since she was a little kid.
You'd think that might count for something.
But he kept coming back to the same question.
"Why not just be a gay man?"
Well, because I'm not a gay man.
"But why not?"
Because. I'm. Not.
"Well, why not just be a ladyboy?"
Because that's not who I am, either.
And around and around we went.
He kept conflating sexual orientation with gender identity, and no matter how many different ways I tried to explain the distinction, he kept circling back to the same fucking question.
Why couldn't I just be something he already understood?
I suppose I could have asked him that directly.
"Why? Because then you'd understand me?"
Although, frankly, I had my doubts.
Instead, I kept trying to explain.
I told him that from my earliest memories, probably three or four years old, I knew something wasn't right. Not that I had some sophisticated understanding of gender identity at preschool age. I didn't.
I just knew that the way the world saw me didn't match the way I experienced myself.
And when you're a little kid, you don't exactly have the vocabulary to explain that.
Especially not back then.
Today, people toss around terms like transgender, gender identity, gender dysphoria, and gender expression as though everybody's been discussing them around the dinner table since the fucking Eisenhower administration.
But when I was growing up, those weren't words people used in ordinary conversation.
Some of the terminology existed in medical and psychiatric circles, sure. But it wasn't exactly something you were going to hear discussed on Saturday morning cartoons.
So what do you do when you're a little kid experiencing something you can't explain, in a world that doesn't seem to have any language for it?
You try to figure it out.
You try to make sense of yourself.
And sometimes you spend a whole hell of a lot of years doing exactly that.
Which brings me to something I think people fundamentally misunderstand.
I chose the name Kate.
I didn't choose the word transgender.
I didn't wake up one morning, stretch, pour myself a cup of coffee, and think, "You know what this world really needs? Another fucking label. I think I'll invent one."
No.
That terminology came from the medical and psychological professions. From people studying human development, human behavior, identity, and the extraordinary complexity of the human experience.
They developed terminology to describe something that already existed.
And eventually, that terminology became part of the language we use to talk about people like me.
Now, the medical classifications themselves have changed over time, too. Some of the old diagnostic language was pretty fucking awful. Some of it treated identity itself as a disorder. And as our understanding evolved, so did the terminology and the diagnostic frameworks.
Imagine that.
Human beings learning things.
What a revolutionary fucking concept.
And here's what really gets me about people who get so hung up on the word transgender.
What exactly would you prefer?
Because the underlying human experience doesn't magically disappear just because you don't like the word somebody uses to describe it.
If you find the terminology offensive, confusing, unnecessary, or just too complicated for your liking, by all means, take it up with the medical and psychological professions.
Tell them you think they should abandon decades of evolving terminology and replace it with something that makes more sense to you.
Apparently, in this fellow's case, that would be "ladyboy."
I'm sure that'll go over fucking swimmingly at the next psychiatric conference.
And while we're at it, why stop there?
Let's bring back female hysteria.
Remember that one?
For generations, all sorts of things women experienced could be attributed to hysteria. Anxiety? Hysteria. Emotional distress? Hysteria. Trouble sleeping? Hysteria. A woman behaving in a way that made the men around her uncomfortable?
Well, obviously, the poor dear was hysterical.
So much simpler than actually trying to understand what was going on.
And let's bring back feeble-mindedness while we're at it.
What a wonderfully convenient term that was. Why bother distinguishing between different intellectual and developmental conditions when you can just lump everybody into one vaguely insulting category?
Fuck it. Let's set the medical terminology clock back to 1915.
Apparently, things were so much easier to understand when we didn't understand nearly as much.
Of course, that's the whole fucking point.
Language changes because knowledge changes.
We develop new words because we develop new understandings. Sometimes we discover that the old words were inaccurate. Sometimes we discover they were unnecessarily stigmatizing. Sometimes we realize that what we thought was one thing is actually several different things.
And sometimes we simply find better ways to describe human experiences that have existed for a very long time.
None of this should be particularly controversial.
We do it in medicine. We do it in science. We do it in psychology. We do it in practically every field of human knowledge.
Nobody gets terribly worked up because astronomers stopped calling Pluto a planet.
Well, okay. Some people did.
But at least Pluto didn't have to spend the next twenty years explaining to strangers why it couldn't just be a fucking planet like everybody remembered.
And that's what makes this whole thing so absurd to me.
I'm not asking anybody to understand every nuance of transgender identity.
I'm not demanding that people memorize a glossary of terminology or complete a semester of gender studies before they're allowed to have a conversation with me.
I'm not even asking people to agree with every medical or psychological explanation that's ever been proposed.
I'm asking them to understand something considerably simpler.
I know who I am.
I've known something about who I am since I was three or four years old, long before I had the language to describe it.
And I don't need somebody else to come up with a more convenient explanation for my existence.
I'm not a gay man.
I'm not a ladyboy.
I'm not a confused version of something that would make more sense to you if I'd just cooperate with your preferred terminology.
I'm Kate.
I'm a woman.
And transgender happens to be the word our society uses to describe a particular aspect of my experience.
That's it.
It doesn't tell you whether I'm a good person. It doesn't tell you whether I'm intelligent, compassionate, funny, stubborn, generous, or a complete fucking pain in the ass.
It doesn't tell you how I vote, what I believe, what kind of motorcycle I ride, what books I write, or who I love.
It's one word.
One fucking word.
And for some reason, people can become so fixated on that one word that they completely miss the human being standing right in front of them.
Looking back, I think there's a question I should have asked that fellow.
Not because I wanted to embarrass him. Not because I wanted to win an argument.
But because I think it might have helped him understand what I was trying to explain.
"When did you decide to be a boy?"
Seriously.
At what age did you sit down, carefully consider your options, weigh the pros and cons, and conclude that being male was the right choice for you?
Was it three?
Four?
Did you have some sort of revelation in kindergarten?
Or did you simply grow up knowing you were a boy, without ever feeling the need to explain why?
Because that's the part people seem to have such a hard time grasping.
For most people, their gender is something they never have to think about. It just fits. The way they understand themselves and the way the world understands them line up well enough that the whole subject barely warrants a second thought.
For some of us, it doesn't work that way.
And we spend years, sometimes decades, trying to reconcile that difference.
Not because we want attention.
Not because we want to be special.
Not because we're trying to make some grand political statement.
But because we'd like to be able to look in the fucking mirror and recognize the person looking back.
And when we finally get there, when we finally find a way to live as ourselves, somebody inevitably comes along and asks why we couldn't just be something else.
Something simpler.
Something they already understand.
Well, here's the thing.
My existence isn't required to make sense to you before I'm allowed to live it.
You don't have to understand every aspect of who I am.
You don't even have to understand the terminology.
But if you genuinely want to know me, you might try listening when I tell you who I am instead of repeatedly suggesting who you think I ought to be.
Because I didn't choose to be transgender.
I chose to stop pretending I wasn't.
And I chose Kate.
That part, at least, was entirely up to me.
