David Cronenberg, Part 1

On passing

Read Part 2.

When you find yourself at the national epicenter of coronavirus, you figure it’s time to start doing bathtub laundry again.

I do it in little loads, an armful of items at a time, but I still make a mess. Today, as soapy water splashed on the bathroom floor, darkening the house slippers Bambi sent me, it occurred to me it might be easier to just wash everything while I’m showering. Kill two birds. Then it wouldn’t matter if I got water on myself.

I’ve been showering with my older sister for as long as I can remember. It’s easier than giving her a shower; like with laundry, doubling up means less mess. When you’re showering someone who is taller than you, you have to lift your arms to rub shampoo into their scalp or scrub their back, and then the water runs down your forearms and into your sleeves. There’s no way to avoid getting splashed or rained on as you gently guide their movements, or assist them over the slippery side of the tub, or lean over to rinse the soap from their legs, so most of the time I’ll just get in with her. Kill two birds. Sometimes we sing while I brush conditioner through her thick auburn hair. She likes to talk about my tattoos. “Remember when I held your hand when you got this one, brother?” she says, pointing at my wrist. She prefers to call her family by our relation to her rather than by our names. I don’t know why.

I never thought I would be showering with her for the rest of our lives, but only because an alternative never once occurred to me. Like everything else I do with/for her, we do it together—showering, using public bathrooms, crossing the street. I sit next to her and wipe her face when she eats. I brush and floss her teeth. I help her put on her panties and her bra. I change her menstrual pads. I dispense her medications. Since almost before I can remember, this is what we have done. Until I started HRT last year, I never imagined that life could be any different for us. When I am “a man,” will it be inappropriate to shower with her? To shower her, even? Is it inappropriate now? Is it wrong for her to see me naked, and for me to see her? Something has changed, but I don’t know when, or how much, or whose fault it is.

It’s one thing to be more or less unable to go into a women’s bathroom by myself anymore. But suddenly I can’t do it with her, either, which means that if we are in public alone together, there will be times when I must let her out of my sight. I can’t go in the stall with her if she needs help locking the door or undoing her belt. I can’t monitor to make sure she wipes herself the right way or washes her hands. I think about piss-speckled toilet seats, grimy grip bars, bacteria-coated doorhandles, all of which she touches without a second thought. And what happens when I need to use the bathroom? If I use the one for men, she’ll have to stand outside and wait, all by herself.

I try to remember that I can’t separate the sense of powerlessness and fear I feel about all this from the unhealthy way I learned to attach my self-worth, even my identity, to my ability to care for her, way back when I was four or five years old. The world won’t end if you have to hang out by the women’s bathroom and hope for the best, David, I scold. As I’ve slowly come to understand that my (natural-feeling) instinct to control everything that she does is harmful for both of us, and a fantasy besides—no, David, watching her every move and keeping her face and hands spotless and guarding her body, delicate and sometimes twitching, often smiling, often laughing, sometimes shrieking, will not keep her perfectly clean, perfectly calm, perfectly quiet, perfectly safe—I’ve learned to talk myself through one of the many totally unexpected anxieties that transition has brought to pass. I mean, I’m not all that good at it, but I’m trying.

When I was a child, many years before I knew I was gay, I worried that people who saw my sister and me holding hands would think we were lesbians. Talk about foreshadowing. The irony is that the fear didn’t even turn out to be misguided, only imprecise. When I finally became a lesbian (or whatever), people did think there was something wrong with us, triggered by a red flag that didn’t seem to appear when she was with my mom or my femme sister. People noticed the two of us more often; people were sometimes suspicious. There was something sexual about us (me) that they couldn’t put their finger on, and when it was paired with what people see as her childishness, as her innocence, it occasionally set off alarms. That’s what it means to be seen as queer, of course, but when she and I were together, the alarm we caused got magnified, marbled, scrambled like an egg. It’s like how you’re just as likely to get hassled when you’re with other queers as when you’re alone. There’s no safety in numbers.

Of course, even though I don’t exactly pass as a woman anymore, I don’t exactly pass as a man, either. Until such a time that I can sink down into white maleness, if that ever even happens, I draw notice in a similar but different way than I did when I wasn’t on hormones. My worries about bathrooms multiply. I’m already seen as a pervert when I’m by myself in public bathrooms—but what will people think if I take her into a gender-neutral bathroom? I’ve started to feel a grudging sympathy for my dad. What did he do in situations like this? How did he feel? I wish I could ask him.

Now, at almost a year on testosterone, my experience as a transsexual mirrors hers as a disabled person in a way it never has before. I’ve become someone whose ability to pass can sortof kindof mostly hold together as long as someone doesn’t look too close, or hear my voice, or watch me move. In the moments before she talks, or before a stranger notices her tics, or her children’s jewelry, or the way I kneel to double-knot her shoe if it comes undone in the grocery store parking lot, someone may think she is not disabled. It happens not infrequently, in restaurants and banks and ticket booths.

Being a transsexual has given me humbling insight into—though of course not true understanding of—her life as a developmentally disabled woman. I’m grateful to be taught, but I wish desperately that I didn’t have to have parallel experiences to learn. What else am I missing?

Read Part 2.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.

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