The Guy Code

There are some unwritten rules and rituals that men seem to absorb without anyone ever bothering to explain them. One of the biggest is that men love to give each other endless amounts of shit. If somebody gets offended, the response usually isn't, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize that bothered you." It's more likely to be, "The fuck? Can't take a fucking joke?" And if you're around blue-collar men, those jabs only get sharper.

Throw military service into the mix, and it stops being entertainment. It becomes a tool.

When I was in the submarine force, we'd intentionally fuck with new people. Not because we were assholes … well, not just because we were assholes, but because we wanted to know where they broke. How do they react under pressure? Do they lose their temper? Do they freeze? Do they quit? Or do they push back without losing control?

That mattered.

One day that same person might be standing next to you while the ocean tried to kill every one of you. Better to discover someone's breaking point during a bullshit argument than during an actual casualty. As strange as it sounds, that kind of hazing was really a trust-building exercise. You wanted to know who you could count on when things went sideways.

Those behaviors don't disappear when you hang up the uniform. Veterans found that approach useful when the stakes were life and death, and most of them don't simply abandon it because they're civilians now. The stakes have changed, but the ritual hasn't.

It's also worth pointing out that in the veteran community, your gender generally doesn't matter. Men get fucked with. Women get fucked with. Officers get fucked with. Enlisted get fucked with. If you're part of the tribe, you're getting fucked with. It's equal opportunity harassment.

Now, I'm a transgender veteran. That puts me in a weird place socially because I never know exactly how a new group of people is going to interact with me. Are they going to treat me as a woman? Are they going to treat me as a man? Or are they going to treat me as a veteran of a foreign fucking war?

Statistically speaking, there's about a two-thirds chance somebody is going to start fucking with me.

Last weekend was no different.

I found myself hanging around a new group of bikers. Some veterans. Some civilians. Men and women mixed together. Sure enough, that two-thirds probability showed up right on schedule.

One of the guys Dawna knows through the trike shop is an incredibly talented motorcycle mechanic. He's the one who builds those trike conversions for disabled veterans, and I genuinely have a tremendous amount of respect for him. The guy knows his shit, his heart is absolutely in the right place, and I'd trust him to build me a motorcycle any day of the week.

But fuck...

He also loves fucking with me.

Like every motorcycle mechanic, he has opinions. Strong opinions. Oil. Tires. Exhausts. Camshafts. Tuners. ECMs. If it bolts onto a motorcycle, every mechanic has already decided which version is God's gift to motorcycling and which version is complete garbage.

His particular hill to die on is the ThunderMax ECM.

He fucking hates them.

A while back, mine needed a software update at exactly the worst possible time and decided it wasn't going to cooperate while I was in Pueblo. To him, that permanently proved ThunderMax units are junk.

I disagree.

Every Harley I own runs one.

Neither of us is changing the other's mind.

That's motorcycles.

More importantly...

That's guys.

Guys don't simply exchange opinions. They challenge them. They poke at them. They look for weaknesses. Sometimes it's because they honestly think you're wrong. Sometimes it's just because arguing is half the fun.

Normally, I enjoy it.

This weekend...

Not so much.

For those of you who haven't followed all my motorcycle adventures, my touring bike isn't down because of the ThunderMax. It's down because of a wiring connector Harley-Davidson already knows is defective. Had I left the motorcycle stock, it would've been a warranty repair. Because I'd modified it, it became my problem instead.

He knows that.

I know he knows that.

Didn't matter.

He saw an opening.

He took the shot.

Normally I'd laugh, throw something right back at him, and we'd spend the next half hour arguing about motorcycles while neither one of us changed our minds.

Unfortunately for both of us...

He picked the wrong fucking day.

I'd just spent the better part of two days riding Aurora nearly five hundred miles with a backpack strapped to my shoulders. I'd spent hours hanging onto the handlebars while seventy-mile-per-hour winds and triple-digit speeds tried to rip me off the bike. My shoulders hurt. My back hurt. I was sunburned. I was exhausted. I was in absolutely no mood to play.

So...

I bit back.

Hard.

Not because I wanted to fight.

Because I was being treated according to the guy code.

When somebody is testing you under those rules, backing down isn't interpreted as maturity. It's interpreted as weakness. And anyone who knows me knows I don't back down very often. I don't back down from bullies. I don't back down from arguments. I don't back down from things I believe are right. I don't bend a fucking knee to anyone simply because they think I should.

That's just not who I am.

The exchange got louder than either of us intended. A mutual friend stepped in to cool things down, and Dawna looked absolutely horrified. From the outside, it probably looked like two grown adults were seconds away from doing something incredibly stupid.

But we weren't.

Neither one of us was ever going to throw a punch.

He was testing me.

I answered.

That was it.

The ritual was complete.

The problem wasn't what happened.

The problem was who was watching.

Afterward, Dawna was upset. Not because she thought I was going to get hurt. Not because she thought I was wrong. She was embarrassed. She'd been looking forward to this event, and suddenly her fiancée was standing in the middle of what looked like an argument in front of people she respected.

And honestly...

I understand that.

From her perspective, it looked unnecessary.

From mine, it wasn't.

That's one of the stranger realities of being transgender. Sometimes I have to operate under two completely different social rulebooks at exactly the same time. Dawna has always treated me as the woman I am. She always will.

Not everyone else does.

Some men don't primarily see me as a woman.

They see me as another veteran.

Another biker.

Another person standing in the circle.

And when they engage me that way, they expect me to play by the same unwritten rules everyone else is playing by.

I've been dealing with that reality for years.

She hasn't.

And that's something I need to remember.

Just because something has become normal for me doesn't mean it's normal for the people who love me. I've spent decades navigating situations where I never quite knew which version of me people were responding to. She hasn't. From her perspective, she watched someone she loves get drawn into an argument for no apparent reason.

From my perspective, it was just another interaction I've had to navigate for years.

We're building a life together now, and for a very long time every decision I made affected exactly one person: Me.

That's no longer true.

Now I have someone standing beside me, and that means I have to remember that my actions don't just represent me anymore. They affect her too, just as hers affect me. That's part of building a life with another person.

Fortunately, we're both pretty good at fixing problems.

We talked.

We listened.

We understood each other a little better afterward than we did before.

That's how healthy relationships are supposed to work.

Besides...

I imagine there aren't a lot of marriage books with a chapter titled, "So Your Transgender Wife Just Participated in a Veteran Dominance Ritual..."

If there are...

I should probably buy one.