The Village Shim

let me just look at you for a moment

My boyfriend and I have this bit about how, back in the old days, we both would have been the Village Shim. In my head, this character exists in the same realm as those caveman cartoons with the leopard-print onesies and turkey bone-shaped clubs, an ahistorical cartoon so deep-fried that you can almost pretend it isn’t secretly racialized (but then, what isn’t). Of course, if we’re going to be literal about the old days, Nes and I would have been shimming in very different villages—my ancestry is European and his is African—so for the purposes of this bit, in which we know each other¹, there has to be some suspension of disbelief. We would have both had leopard-print onesies, although mine would probably have had a pink bow.

The bit sticks, I think, because while neither of us know what our lives would have been like a thousand years ago, or whatever, it’s fun to pretend that we would have been together and that our genderweirdness would have had a social designation that wasn’t especially alienating or dangerous. That, while maybe a little unusual, it would have been more-or-less legible to the people around us, and that we would have had a role to fulfill based on this observable but minor variance². But even on its own terms, this fantasy doesn’t hold water—the Village Shim is, definitionally, a weirdo, at odds with the normal genders in a similar state of difference as the Village Idiot, a humiliated figure of ableism upon whom our bit depends. Even when fantasizing about a life with less social friction, I’m unable to do so without reifying the kind that already exists.

One time I hooked up with this beautiful real estate guy who came from lots of money. We had good chemistry, and he forgot himself with me. With the easy intimacy of straight men (I’m the only man a relationship needs, he said proudly), he spoke about the strange self-awareness of being a tall, handsome, rich Black man who felt welcomed and threatened in equal measure every time he entered a room. He mentioned his desire to travel to South Africa for all the fat-assed women there, before abruptly silencing himself, perhaps embarrassed to have shared a heterosexual thought with me, the decidedly not-fat-assed white boy he’d just bred. He didn’t know that I was used to this. Straight men call me their trophy, their fantasy, their ideal, but they would never introduce me to their parents. They come into my home, lie in my bed, and tell me everything. I’m the male friend they can fuck and the woman they can trust (or is it the other way around). I am everything in one person—like a lot of trans people, I’ve been demeaned with the best of both worlds too many times. Don’t stop, he said, when, for a moment, I ceased stroking his leg. He wanted to know if I could cook.

I worry that I’m making him sound as if he wasn’t absolutely charming, as if he didn’t walk into my house, smile, and throw open his arms, saying, Let me just look at you for a moment. When someone has been deeply loved by their family, they shine like a lighthouse for their entire lives. And yet he needed something from me. What does it feel like to be need as a woman? As a man? I know, but I will also never know.

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1. Although this undermines the singular nature of Village Shim-ness.

2. Which isn’t to say that, here and now, trans people aren’t absolutely legible. The pretense that we aren’t is one of the more insidious aspects of the bigotry that endangers us.